On 13 Dec 2021 01:19, Paul Eggert wrote: > If the goal is to move GNU tar to generate ustar or pax format by > default, none of these problems are insuperable; we can eventually get > people to read the tarballs.
imo, this is the goal for GNU tar > But if the goal is to generate tarballs > that are widely useful without trouble, I'm not so sure that defaulting > to pax format would be a win. for automake, the limitations in the default v7 catch people off guard (like filename limits). so pushing pax adoption will help with automake changing its default. of course, for legacy systems that can't easily update, and are unable to install GNU tar, that might not be an option, so we'd never remove support for tar-v7. but i don't think we should keep making trouble for projects the default in order to support decades old systems that most people probably don't care about. and if such projects have a user show up who is like "man i really wish i had a v7 here but i can't find a modern system to convert it myself", maybe that project will consider changing the default back to v7. but i think we need to get off the mindset of defaults should target systems that are 30+ old to the detriment of 99.999% of devs. -mike
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