On Mittwoch 22 April 2009, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > There is a 1-5% chance that GNU tar does fail this way, did you try to > > > restore enough GNU tar multi-volume archives? Did you restore more than > > > 100 multi-volume archives? > > > > No, just a couple of douzend so far. My lib takes 8 cardridges. So far no > > problems. I did maybe four or five complete restores so far. Before that > > I had a single dlt drive and played disc jokey - no problems there too. > > So I am well below the 100 multi-volume archives, but well above the 30 > > mark. > > For me it happened with the second try.... A few years after I made a bug > report, the GNU tar maintainers made the probability for this to happen a > bit lower but they did not change the basic format that cannot support all > cases.
hm, well, that got me thinking. Because stable multi volume support is very important for me. More than being close to other tars. But - can I extract a multivolume tar archive created by star with gnu tar? The man page is not entirely clear and for restore I have to assume that star is not available. > > > > ACLs, xattrs and others. > > > > okay. Then tar is still good enough for me. > > Well, there is no "tar" on Linux. > > GNU tar is not tar and GNU tar still does not by default write tar > compatible archives. Star is much closer to "tar" than GNU tar is... well, IMHO this is a bit 'academic'. GNU tar does what I expect it to do - if there are differences, they don't seem to be relevant to me or most linux users. But I don't claim that I am the norm to measure against. You seem to have been running into trouble by this differences? > > > See, it is a good thing that you wrote star (and cdrecord and other > > things). Your code is much appreciated - but I am very reluctant to use a > > piece of software when another one I am currently using is 'good enough' > > for me. Since I don't use acls or xattrs the lack of support in gnu tar > > does not hurt me. I also had a hard time to figure out the optimal > > command line to use my tapelib - I don't want to do that again with star > > if I don't have to. > > If you trust GNU tar, this is your personal decision. I definitely don't > trust GNU tar. > > Every time I was considering to implement a feature (seen first in GNU tar) > for star, I thought about possible implementation problems and I _always_ > found a GNU tar bus in less than 5 minutes. The fact that fixing GNU tar > bugs I reported to the GNU tar maintainers did take between 2 and 15 years > makes me asume that GNU tar is not well maintained. as I wrote above, you got me thinking. If I can extract a multivolume archive created with star with gnutar I am sold and will try star. I have to have a closer look at the -fifo/fs= options. The man page makes it look promising. > > > > > can star decompress files? > > > > > > Are you kidding? > > > > nope. > > http://bulk.fefe.de/lk2006/ > > > > For some reason, my tar hung on Solaris. I have no idea why. truss showed > > that it wasn't in a syscall at that time. So I used star instead. Turns > > out that star can't do "star xzf -", it will say "Can only compress > > files." ROTFL! OK, so I used "|gzip -dc|star xf -" instead. What the > > hell. > > Your mistake is to quote a well known troll. > > This troll in special did use a command line that would expect him to > manually type _compressed_ _tar_ _archives_ on his tty....... ah, okay that explains a lot. Glück Auf, Volker
