Re: [ft-devel] PaxHeaders directories when using BSD tar

[Stephen Fisher]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:22:53PM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> according to its `--help' output.  This implies that your tar program 
> isn't capable yet of handling the POSIX-1.2001 specification of the 
> tar format (implied by the `--format=posix' configuration option) ? 

In case anyone's interested: After some research, I found that NetBSD by 
default uses the pax program to emulate tar using a hard link.  This pax 
program supports cpio, bcpio, sv4cpio, sv4crc, tar (4.3 BSD tar) and 
ustar formats.  It does however support gzip/bzip2 and even xz.  I also 
saw GNU extensions mentioned in the source code.  There is an option to 
build bsdtar from libarchive.  This libarchive based tar does support 
the new POSIX style of tar used by freetype.  I'm relatively new to 
NetBSD, so I don't know the rationale for using one over the other.

> given that this standard appeared 13 years ago, I rather think that 
> BSD tar urgently needs an update, and you should complain to the 
> NetBSD maintainers...
> 
> Anyways, I'll add option `-H ustar' to the tar program to use the 
> ancient POSIX.1-1988 standard for the next upload.

Thank you, I appreciate it.  For what its worth, a few dozen other 
autotools based applications that I've downloaded so far use ustar as 
well.