On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 08:32:33AM +1100, Sam Couter wrote: > My point is that the -I option *doesn't* mean "uncompress this file using > bzip2" for anything other than GNU tar. Now that it doesn't mean that for > GNU tar either, people are complaining. I think they probably shouldn't have > been using -I to start with, at least not as a matter of habit or in scripts > that might live for any decent length of time or have an application on any > non-GNU system.
That's not much of a point at all. Why? First, it's obvious that someone wanted these functions or they wouldn't have been added to gnu tar. There are a lot of things, e.g., preserving atime or stripping /'s, that are quite useful and cannot be done in a portable fashion. Suggesting that people never use these functions is silly. Second, most installations I'm familiar with have various gnu utilities installed, tar being one of them. IOW, cross-platform compatibility is achieved by installing the same software on each platform. Doing that should give a user a reasonable chance of having the same options available on each platform--unless the program fails to maintain compatibility with itself. -- Mike Stone
