tags +292774 wontfix thanks On Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:20:42 +0200, Witold Baryluk <[email protected]> wrote: > i would also like to have this possiblity, > to use bsdtar as tar provider. Currently > it is impossible to use it by bsdtar, becuase > tar should in first place provide alternative to tar.
It's much more complicated than you suggest. First, because tar is 'essential' and 'required' in our packaging system, there are no dependency assertions present in other packages that need a working tar. This makes it hard to know what requirements exist, and to understand whether some other version of tar can really substitute for GNU tar. Since GNU tar has been "tar" for the entire history of Debian, it seems entirely possible and likely that some packages depend on features / command line options / etc of this version of tar that are not supported by alternatives like bsdtar. Second, dpkg has a known strong dependency on tar. That means that if anything in the system 'breaks' tar, it will be very hard for an average user to fix the problem... because they won't be able to install or upgrade packages. To me, this means that adding additional dependencies or package management complexity to tar is something we must consider *very* carefully. In summary, adding /etc/alternatives support to tar is the least of my concerns about making this change. A thorough analysis of the rest of the issues must be undertaken before we can begin to consider this request. Marking this bug 'wontfix' for now, since I currently have no motivation to engage in such an analysis. Bdale
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