Let me comment some questions in one single mail:
My basic requirement with what I'm doing is to use standard tools and formats so that archives I write today can be readable in 10 years.
Star becomes 30 in 4 months, any archive created since it's early beginning in summer 1982 can still be read back.
I have been using it for about a decade or more and anything I dumped has been a no brainer to retrieve, on any other OS or even architecture.
I don't think there is any such general consensus. Are you reading something that favors Solaris/*bsd over GNU based systems?
Schily tools (and in special star) implement support for Linux specific extensions. This is what you do not get from gtar at all. So why do Linux distros prefer gtar even though there is no Linux support?
Is there any correlation between this and the warning message I see during a bootstrap like so :
Warning: *** /usr/src/linux/include contains broken include files *** Warning: *** /usr/src/linux/include is not used this reason *** Warning: This may result in the inability to use recent Linux kernel interfaces
Warning: *** linux/ext2_fs.h is not usable at all *** Warning: *** This makes it impossible to support Linux file flags *** You may try to compile using 'make COPTX=-DTRY_EXT2_FS'
I doubt if they are as well maintained in linux distros as the GNU tool set, particularly in terms of having recent fixes backported into the versions carried in enterprise distros.
gtar still did not fix bugs I reported in 1993 (e.g. the bug that causes gtar to complain with "skipping to next header" even on it's own archives). I am thus sure that star not not worse than gtar....
There seems to be something missing here.
The subject was "schily tools" which is a lot more than star :
root@rsync:/etc/default# ls /opt/schily/bin bosh cdrecord isodebug mdigest pfsh sfind star ustar bsh change isodump mkhybrid pxupgrade sformat star_sym ved btcflash compare isoinfo mkisofs readcd sgrow suntar ved-e calc copy isovfy mt sccs sh tar ved-w calltree count jsh od scgcheck smake tartest cdda2mp3 devdump label opatch scgskeleton smt termcap cdda2ogg gnutar lndir p scpio spatch translit cdda2wav hdump match pfbsh sdd spax udiff
care to comment on any of these ? Certainly bosh needs a few words.
dc
Dennis Clarke dclarke@blastwave.org wrote:
I don't think there is any such general consensus. Are you reading something that favors Solaris/*bsd over GNU based systems?
Schily tools (and in special star) implement support for Linux specific extensions. This is what you do not get from gtar at all. So why do Linux distros prefer gtar even though there is no Linux support?
Is there any correlation between this and the warning message I see during a bootstrap like so :
Warning: *** /usr/src/linux/include contains broken include files *** Warning: *** /usr/src/linux/include is not used this reason *** Warning: This may result in the inability to use recent Linux kernel interfaces
Warning: *** linux/ext2_fs.h is not usable at all *** Warning: *** This makes it impossible to support Linux file flags *** You may try to compile using 'make COPTX=-DTRY_EXT2_FS'
This is indeed one of the Linux specific issues. The Linux kernel guys create defective include files. In other words:
The linux kernel include files that are needed in order to access certain features (in this case the ext* extended file flags) cause a C compiler error in case they are used from a userland program.
Jörg
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Dennis Clarke -
Joerg.Schilling＠fokus.fraunhofer.de