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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Tar has been unchanged for a hell of a long time.
Yeah. The latest version of GNU tar is from April 2008.
> That makes it either antiquated or
> increadibly well-designed, depending on how you look at it.
If it was not good enough, it would have surely been enhanced or changed
to something else.
--
- Warp
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"Doctor John" <joh### [at] home com> wrote in message
news:489b1cdf$1@news.povray.org...
> How about incredibly well designed and tested like most *nix utilities
I wouldn't say that. Like most *nix utils, tar has its idiosyncracies. It's
just that changes would break too many things.
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somebody wrote:
> I wouldn't say that. Like most *nix utils, tar has its idiosyncracies.
Actually, it sucks pretty badly for manipulating actual tape archives,
when you get right down to it.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?
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Warp wrote:
>> That makes it either antiquated or
>> increadibly well-designed, depending on how you look at it.
>
> If it was not good enough, it would have surely been enhanced or changed
> to something else.
"Good enough" isn't "incredibly well-designed". ;-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?
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Invisible wrote:
> Personally, I thought Tar was completely obsolete now?
HUH? 99.999% of programming projects give their code in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2
archives.
> On the other hand, other than the equally naff Zip format, I'm not aware
> of anything else that is really widely supported. (Arguably the 7zip
> format is nicer - but who supports that? Er, yeah, 7zip. And nobody
> else.) Does anybody here know different?
7zip is better, but the only complete implementation is tied to Windows
features... (p7zip doesn't support PPMd compression, for example, only
LZMA).
> Then another fanboy yelled at me that it's "easy" to find a Win32 port
> of Tar. Sure, it's so "easy" in fact that I wasted an entire afternoon
> trying to do this and ultimately failed.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gtar.htm
> Specifically, I found a TAR.EXE, but it instantly crashes because it
> can't find "cygwin.dll". And, almost unbelievably, I can't find anywhere
> on the face of the Internet where I can download this file - including
> the Cygwin website!
cygwin.dll? That must be an ancient program. cygwin1.dll is what all cygwin
programs use now.
As for getting the dll... you download setup.exe, which is a package manager
on its own. The default options should come with tar already, otherwise
select it from the huge package list. You'll get a full bash shell in a
window :)
> So the guy yelled at me "well why don't you have Cygwin installed
> already?" Er, hello? Why should I have to set up an entire Unix
> emulation environment just to develop Haskell programs? Haskell is
> supposed to be portable, remember? Suffice it to say the guy didn't
> think I could be a "real developer" if I don't have Cygwin installed.
OK that gets immature from his part :)
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"Darren New" <dne### [at] san rr com> wrote
> somebody wrote:
> > I wouldn't say that. Like most *nix utils, tar has its idiosyncracies.
> Actually, it sucks pretty badly for manipulating actual tape archives,
> when you get right down to it.
The problem in academia/*nix world is a bit of idol worship and inertia. I
had to use TEX/LATEX again the other day. Great concept for its day (and
even for today) and it still works of course, but what a mess and PITA. It
needs a major rewrite to bring it into the 21st century. Being not buggy and
predictable (for those with an intimate knowledge of its inner workings, at
least) is not the same as being "incredibly well designed" - especially
after 5-10 years in the software business.
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somebody <x### [at] y com> wrote:
> "Darren New" <dne### [at] san rr com> wrote
> > somebody wrote:
> > > I wouldn't say that. Like most *nix utils, tar has its idiosyncracies.
> > Actually, it sucks pretty badly for manipulating actual tape archives,
> > when you get right down to it.
The tar *program* maybe, but manipulating the tar *format* is just a
question of selecting the program you like. I'm sure there are many
advanced and GUI'ed programs which can handle tar (and other) formats
in multitude of ways.
> The problem in academia/*nix world is a bit of idol worship and inertia. I
> had to use TEX/LATEX again the other day. Great concept for its day (and
> even for today) and it still works of course, but what a mess and PITA. It
> needs a major rewrite to bring it into the 21st century. Being not buggy and
> predictable (for those with an intimate knowledge of its inner workings, at
> least) is not the same as being "incredibly well designed" - especially
> after 5-10 years in the software business.
One advantage of LaTeX over most other text editing software is that its
input is ascii text. This makes it relatively easy to write programs which
generate LaTeX files and then let LaTeX handle the nice formatting.
Of course not many appreciate this, not even many programmers who are
tasked to create a program which produces visually-pleasing documents.
One of the easiest way of doing this is, by far, make the program output
a proper LaTeX file, rather than trying to use some obscure library or,
heaven forbid, try to create the PDF/PS itself (which is really *not* worth
the programming trouble).
Could the LaTeX input format be improved? Sure. However, it has worked
for a couple of decades, and usually the principle is "if it works, don't
fix it".
--
- Warp
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On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:48:22 -0600, somebody wrote:
> The problem in academia/*nix world is a bit of idol worship and inertia
s/academia\/\*nix/the Windows/
Statement is still true....Everyone has fanboys....
Jim
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Warp wrote:
>>> Actually, it sucks pretty badly for manipulating actual tape archives,
>>> when you get right down to it.
>
> The tar *program* maybe, but manipulating the tar *format* is just a
> question of selecting the program you like.
I was speaking of actual tape archives on actual tapes. Not files
pretending to be tapes, but you know, those long skinny things wound
around spools. :-) I am not sure how a pretty GUI on the front might or
might not help that. :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?
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Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>>>> Actually, it sucks pretty badly for manipulating actual tape archives,
>>>> when you get right down to it.
>>
>> The tar *program* maybe, but manipulating the tar *format* is just a
>> question of selecting the program you like.
>
> I was speaking of actual tape archives on actual tapes.
Actually, the format is pretty sucky for tape archives too.
There's no central directory of files in the archive, so you have to
read the entire tape to determine what's on it.
There's no archive-level metadata, so you can't tell when the tape was
created, or why, or how many tapes are in the set, or what parameters
might be needed to extract it (see the "B" option, for example).
There metadata is fixed-format, which means it's incompatible with newer
versions of the format, because there isn't even a place to record what
version of the metadata is there.
The metadata is very single-machine specific, so (for example) you can't
restore the tape to a different machine with a different username->uid
mapping and expect it to work. Indeed, you can't even tell what the
uid's represent by inspection so you can't even write a program to
demangle it when it's done.
The data is all stored in block sizes, wasting a lot of space in spite
of the fact that tar cannot update the middle of an archive nor does the
tar program seek the file even if it's on disk. This also causes one to
have to read and write in block sizes, even tho the file is "supposed"
to be an "array of bytes" kind of thing.
Just as a few nits... :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?
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