> 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 at 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 -- -- http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x1D936C72FA35B44B +-------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | Dennis Clarke | Solaris and Linux and Open Source | | dclarke at blastwave.org | Respect for open standards. | +-------------------------+-----------------------------------+