[WinMac] Re: Tar & archive formats
John Droggitis(johnd[at]cybernex.net)
Wed, 22 Sep 1999 10:42:21 +0000
Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> Exactly what I said above. It's a FLAT FILE structure based
> on pathnames rather than having actual "links" between a parent
> directory and it's children. And yes, each of those entries has a
> header with some basic information - but information that is
> incomplete for Unix, let alone other platforms (Wintel, MacOS, etc.).
Right. I'm not arguing with your flat file assertion. What I'm saying is that
the there's nothing inadequate with using a flat file, as long as it contains all
needed information. And the information that it contains is not incomplete:
<geek> all the fields of the unix stat structure, which is the _complete_ set of
file statistics, except the device specific details, are included in the tar
header </geek>.
> Also, as I noted in my message, those pathnames are SHORT
> (100 characters), ASCII-based, which makes storing/restoring
> non-English filenames pretty much impossible. To use your
> reference, see
> <http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_mono/tar.html#TOC112> and
> <http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_mono/tar.html#TOC109>).
>
> GNU tar may support absolute pathnames, but it's not part of
> the POSIX spec for tar.
>
GNU tar supports both absolute pathnames and (very) long filenames and paths.
POSIX specs don't consern me, it's the actual product you use that matters.
> Let's also not forget about other well known limitations of
> Tar such as EXTREMELY poor recovery of corrupted archives, lack of a
> segmenting architecture, Unix-centricity, and of course no support
> for integrated compression (NOTE: .tgz is NOT integrated compression
> since it requires decompression of the entire archive before being
> able to extract a single item!)
Look, I'm not saying that tar is the best archiver/backup solution. All I'm
trying to say is that tar is perfectly adequate. The original point that I was
refuting was "don't use unix as a fileserver because tar is no good", and it was
based on incorrect assertions about tar. Tar is very prevalent and widestpread,
has ports to every major platform and it supports features that stuffit and
retrospect don't have, but I REALLY don't want to get into that. Even if you
don't like tar, there are commercial solutions you can use for unix as well, such
as CTAR (which is based on tar :-) and solidstor.
> As the original author of StuffIt Expander, and most of the
> components of the StuffIt Engine (incl. the Tar support) I stand by
> my categorization of Tar and it's (lack of) usefulness as a backup
> and archiving solution.
Nice to see your credentials. I've been a software developer and administrator
primarily on unix machines for 10 years now, and I can read the tar source code
and understand it - and I have. I think I've proven my point and since this is
getting way off topic, let's continue this privately, but I really don't think
there's much left to say.
--John
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