Suggestions for improving GNU tar. * Incorporate fixes from major distributions, e.g., Debian GNU/Linux. * Add support for restoring file time stamps to sub-second resolution, if the file system supports this. * Add support for restoring the attributes of symbolic links, for OSes like FreeBSD that have the lutimes and lchmod functions. * --append should bail out if the two archives are of different types. * Add support for GNU private keywords in POSIX 1003.1-2001 headers, so that the GNU extensions (--incremental, --label and --multi-volume) may be used with POSIX archives. * Add support for a 'pax' command that conforms to POSIX 1003.1-2001. This would unify paxutils with tar. * Remove command-line incompatibilities between GNU tar and UNIX tar as specified by UNIX98. The main problem is: l GNU tar doesn't cross filesystem boundaries. UNIX98 tar warns if all links cannot be resolved. (GNU tar --check-links option) Currently tar prints a warning when this option is used. Sometime in the future its semantics will be changed to that of --check-links. In the meanwhile we should announce a phase-in period where "l" changes in semantics. * Interoperate better with Joerg Schilling's star implementation. * Add an option to remove files that compare successfully. From: Roesinger Eric Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 18:43:43 -0500 It would be useful to be able to use '--remove-files' with '--diff', to remove all files that compare successfully, when verifying a backup. * Add tests for the new functonality. * Consider this: From: Dennis Pund Subject: TAR suggestion... Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 18:26:36 -0500 (EST) What I would like to do is: foo my.tar.gz | tar -xzOf - | tar -cMf - -L 650000 - | bar where 'foo' is a program that retrieves the archive and streams it to stdout and bar is a program that streams the stdin to CDR. (http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2002-05/msg00022.html) * Copyright notice Copyright (C) 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of GNU tar. GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with tar; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" end: