Re: Translator support for GNU tar

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 10:22:34PM +0200, Marco Gerards wrote:
> I wrote a patch for GNU tar to support passive translators.

Wow.  This is definitely going in the right direction.

> To add translators to a tar file you have to use the "-a" switch. It
> doesn't add symlinks, devices and fifos. I guess that is the behaviour
> we want.

In effect, yes.  I am not quite sure on tar's internal logic, but it
appeared to me when I looked at it a long time ago, it was easy to check for
translators before for everything else (fifos, symlinks etc).

Then you can use the Hurd convention of "/hurd/symlink" etc to detect
symlinks.  This is better because many translators disguise as device files
or fifos, although they aren't.

So, we want to treat real symlinks (/hurd/symlink) as symlinks, etc, but any
other translator settings as they are.  We don't want to use the standard
Unix test for this (testing the stat mode bits), but instead use the
translator string.  This is more accurate.

This should not be much harder to implement, and will also make it easier to
fine-tune the recursive behaviour later.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/