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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tar for the base revision
From: |
David Brown |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tar for the base revision |
Date: |
Tue, 23 Sep 2003 20:32:32 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.4i |
On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 04:35:04PM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> > How is cpio by these measures?
>
> I forget. I explicitly rejected it for some reason. And I don't
> really have enough desk-space here to maintain a proper labnotes
> workbook --- so I forget exactly why I rejected it. But I do
> remember explicitly considering it.
The primary complaint against cpio is that it only stores numeric
uid/gid fields. I would guess that arch would always want to extract
using the current user's id anyway.
Some additional problems, that may not be major:
- There are a few variants of the format. But, a few are portable
(use ASCII characters for the fields).
- The user interface is quite arcane. It requires on stdin a list of
the files/directories to archive.
- You can't store a file named !!!TRAILER
- The format only stores 16 or 32 bits of inode information. This
only affects hardlinked files, and most implementations successfully
work around this.
- _Most_ implementations, other than Gnu cpio have a bunch of strange
bugs, usually resulting in files not getting backed up.
The last one would certainly be a winner.
Although, the file format is simple enough that for arch purposes, the
code to build and expand the archives could be added to arch fairly
easily.
Dave