On 2020-05-18, Laslo Hunhold <[email protected]> wrote: > I have objections for this patch. I don't like the old style and it's > horribly annoying with tools like unrar and 7z as well. I don't know > why the compression tools all ignore years of established command line > syntax, but I think we shouldn't chime in to this mad play.
Whether you like it or not, it's the most common usage of tar by far, and as far as I know, the only one that was ever standardized. You are not forced to use this syntax, the usage following the Utility Syntax Guidelines still works after this patch. > At least, I would print a warning if the old style syntax is seen so > people start fixing their scripts. On what basis are scripts written to the SUSv2 specification broken? Because we said so? Ethan looked at a bunch of tar implementations, and some did not support the hyphenated options. Therefore, the most portable way to call tar is with the old-style options. Personally, I think tar is a hopeless interface and we should implement pax in sbase. I started on an implementation a while ago, but it is unfinished. After this, we can remove this tar implementation, which has some known bugs and deficiencies, and possibly replace it with a tar compatibility interface to pax. This tar compatibility interface should probably support the hyphen-less option key, since its whole purpose is legacy compatibility.
