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Re: [Help-tar] tar patch to selectively divert named compressors to alte


From: ERSEK Laszlo
Subject: Re: [Help-tar] tar patch to selectively divert named compressors to alternatives
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 11:51:34 +0200 (CEST)

On Thu, 8 Oct 2009, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:

ERSEK Laszlo <address@hidden> ha escrit:

I kindly request you to review the patch below.

Have you tried the patch I sent you?

Your patch appeared on the list betwen me sending mine and mine appearing on the list, so no.


I prefer a single option instead. Tar is already overloaded with command
option names. Two option names per each compressor program is too much.

Absolutely. I feel I was a bit too eager to write mine at all; after my post
where I said "lbzip2 is not a drop-in replacement for bzip2" there was a
short silence on the list and I supposed it's my task to write the patch.
Since you as the maintainer put in the work (thanks for that!), just forget
my patch.


Apart from that, there remains my remark from the previous posting.
I'm not sure the game is worth the candles. It seems much simpler to
have an option/variable that would allow to redefine the compressor
name at compile time instead.

I was personally okay with --use=lbzip2. (Wherever GNU tar is unavailable, one has to pipe even gzip manually, and I have no problem with that either.) I was asked to ask you on the debian-mentors mailing list.

I think the motivation is that such a default option would allow
automatically speeding up compression/decompression without changing scripts
or routinely issued commands. Changing the compressor name directly to an
alternative at compile time would work, but that would give no easy way out
for people unpleased with that alternative.

Let's prepare a suggestion:

    GNU tar should be patched in Debian to replace each instance of the
    "bzip2" program name with "/etc/alternatives/bzip2-filter" (same for
    "gzip" -> "gzip-filter" etc.), and pbzip2, lbzip2, pigz etc. should
    install alternatives. The non-standard symlink names ("bzip2-filter")
    signify that these alternatives are meant only for when filtering is
    needed, not as general replacements. This way at least a system
    administrator could change the compressors without local recompilation.

Would you support this suggestion? If so, I'd relay it to the debian-mentors
mailing list, along with pointers to both patches posted here.

Thank you very much,
lacos




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