Re: tar-pax or tar-ustar as a default for automake

[Andrew W. Nosenko]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 16:59, Bob Friesenhahn
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Andrew W. Nosenko wrote:
>>
>> Hmmm...  What about do not enforce any particular format by default?
>> Especially if consider that on my FreeBSD automake already enforses
>> ustar when tries to enforce v7 ;-)
>>
>>   tardir=testprog-0.0.0 && /usr/local/bin/bash
>> /home/user/tmp/testprog/missing --run tar chof - "$tardir" | bzip2 -9
>> -c >testprog-0.0.0.tar.bz2
>>
>> The 'o' option in the 'tar chof -' above means '-‐format ustar' for
>> bsdtar instead of '--format v7' for GNU tar :-)
>
> That is very interesting.  On my Solaris system, I see that the 'gtar'
> program was selected.  With this 'gtar' the -o option is equivalent to:
>
>      --old-archive, --portability
>                             same as --format=v7
>
> but I see that with bsdtar -o requests a different format:
>
>     -o      (c, r, u mode) A synonym for --format ustar
>

On FreeBSD tar (/usr/bin/tar) is bsdtar.
When automake targets v7 format, it doesn't do any checks, just
defaults to "missing --run tar chof - "$tardir"" and relies on
'missing' script to workaround if something goes not properly (i.e. if
strioghtforward invocation of "tar chof -" won't work).
But tar (bsdtar) know about -o, creates tarfile, returns success, etc.
 Just means under '-o' not the same, as caller :-)

-- 
Andrew W. Nosenko <address@hidden>