cpio vs. tar

cpio vs. tar

[Bill Walker]

Forwarded message:

> Is it really worth the bother?    Isn't cpio one of those utilities 
> that's been around since UNIX was distributed on clay tablets?   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 though X/open has marked it "to be withdrawn" and SUSv2 tags it as 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?
> 
> 
> 
> Alternately, we can continue to patch this one system at a time until
> we all die.    Here's one that should fix the system this was reported
> on.
> 

Hmm.  At the risk of generating a lot of flying pieces, how about
just including GNU cpio (or GNU tar) with the compiler in the first place ?

If that is a political/technical atrocity, perhaps a "minimal" utility
could be created and shipped.  Something like a "shar" which might
run under any boat-anchor with a shell.  (Duck!  Duck!)

BW




-- 
Bill Walker Ph.D.
Chairman, Dept. of Computer Science
East Central University
Ada, Oklahoma 74820-6899

e-mail:  bw@cs.ecok.edu 
phone:   580 332 8000 ext. 594
FAX:     580 332 4616

Re: cpio vs. tar

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < m0xSkoa-0000NmC@student.ecok.edu >you write:
  > Hmm.  At the risk of generating a lot of flying pieces, how about
  > just including GNU cpio (or GNU tar) with the compiler in the first place ?
The distribution is already quite large -- adding more stuff to it
just to "support" the compiler tools is something I'd like to shy
away from.

Contrast this to including texinfo, which allowed us to remove the
.info files.  The net result was a (slighly) smaller distribution.

It's easier just to deal with tar & cpio.  Every system of note has
one or the other.

Systems that don't have tar/cpio likley have many other more serious
problems :-)

jeff