From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeffrey A Law To: Robert Lipe Cc: Joern Rennecke , egcs@cygnus.com, Bill Walker Subject: Re: cpio vs. tar. was: OSR5 install of 971031 Date: Tue, 04 Nov 1997 11:52:00 -0000 Message-id: <11733.878663141@hurl.cygnus.com> References: <19971104091607.20107@dgii.com> X-SW-Source: 1997-11/msg00149.html In message < 19971104091607.20107@dgii.com >you write: > Is it really worth the bother? Isn't cpio one of those utilities > that's been around since UNIX was distributed on clay tablets? Yes, but many systems in the past did't have cpio. And, my linux box doesn't seem to have it either. I guess that's a package I didn't install :-) > Even though X/open has marked it "to be withdrawn" and SUSv2 tags > it as "legacy" suggesting that "Applications should migrate to the > pax utility.", would any OS vendor not ship cpio? Lots used to not ship cpio, that's changed over time. > If we were to do anything more ambitious autoconf-ish, would it be > any wiser to test for pax and use it instead of either tar or cpio? > Then we'd have three different install-headers-* targets, and I doubt > that would be a lot of fun, either. I'd prefer to just stick with tar/cpio between those two we should have every significant unix covered. I wouldn't object to removing the "B" from the tar options and then removing cpio support -- I'm not aware of a system that doesn't ship tar (then again, maybe you are :-) jeff