Magnus Holmgren <holmg...@debian.org> writes:
> libtar popped up on wnpp-alert, so I ITAd it, but now I'm having second
> thoughts. I've done one upload now though.
>
> - No new releases since 2003. Upstream hasn't bothered building a dynamic
> library, that's a Debian patch (and a corresponding patch in other distros).
>
> - libarchive is superior (I suppose).
>
> - The API has some problems: th_get_pathname() sometimes returns a pointer
> into the TAR struct passed to it and sometimes a pointer to malloc()ed memory
> (a strdup() of a local buffer). It has been suggested to always strdup() the
> result instead, but it's also been suggested to return a pointer to a static
> buffer in applicable cases, which I think may be better (you have to copy the
> returned string anyway since the TAR struct is updated as you iterate over
> the
> tar contents). Thoughts?
Thread safety and rentrancy is a problem there.
A third option is to pass a buffer to the function (plus its size) and
fill it with the name. I would probide both a strdup() and a buffer
passing version of the function so people can choose.
> - Another problem is the tartype_t struct that you can pass to tar_open() to
> provide your own functions for opening, reading and writing the underlying
> file, e.g. to handle compressed tar files. Unfortunately you have to put your
> context in an int instead of a more versatile void*.
>
> - It is riddled with MAXPATHLEN, so getting it to build on HURD doesn't seem
> worthwile.
>
> - It has few rdepends:
> barry - uses th_get_pathname() (with the comment "FIXME (leak) - someday,
> when all distros use a patched version of libtar, we may be able to
> avoid this memory leak, but th_get_pathname() does not consistently
> return a user-freeable string on all distros."
> composite - already supports libarchive, it seems.
> lordsawar - Not sure about this one.
> osmo - Uses libtar very simply to make and restore backups. Should be easy
> to convert to libarchive.
> stopmotion - Not sure about this one.
> vlc - The skins2 UI module uses libtar to unpack skins. Should be easy
> to convert to libarchive.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> --
> Magnus Holmgren holmg...@debian.org
> Debian Developer
I guess the maintainers of the rdepends should make the choice (and do
the work :).
MfG
Goswin
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