On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > Jim Meyering wrote: >> >> Perhaps we should >> try harder to find a tar-creating program that has options to do the >> above, and simply abort when it is not found. > > > For creating tarballs, I think it'd be enough to simply specify the options > on the command line. Traditional 'tar' will reject them (with "tar: =: > unknown function modifier") and will fail. By and large, only developers > want to create tarballs, and it's OK to ask them to use development-quality > tools. > > I did propose an Automake patch, here: > > http://bugs.gnu.org/20132
Glanced through, but didn't have time for a thorough review. > This patch misspells "automake" as "autoconf"; I'll fix that before it goes > in. > > It's just a quality-of-implementation issue, as unpatched Automake will work > OK with bleeding-edge gzip. The main upside of the patch is that even with > bleeding-edge gzip Automake would by default generate .gz tarballs no larger > than the tarballs generated by unpatched Automake with older gzip. That works for me. Thanks for dealing with all of this.
