Paxutils project
This whole subsite
is the copy of an old, obsolete site which is currently
presented as a public archive, which will likely disappear after
a while. Most of the contained information is not current. This
page also holds bits from a letter of mine to Richard Stallman
and Sergey, in 2003, trying to expose the situation of Paxutils
as I perceive or remember it.
Contents
This archive site became possible after Sergey Poznyakoff got
from Paul Eggert, on 2004-03, a copy of all administrative files
I (François Pinard) transmitted to Paul on 1999-07, when Paul
officially took over tar and Paxutils
responsibilities. The main purpose of this site is to ease the
communication with the current tar and Paxutils
maintainer, Sergey Poznyakoff, in view of salvaging some worth
contributions from users.
I will progressively dismantle this site. In particular, all
email folders have been withdrawn in 2008.
Welcome page for Paxutils 2.4i
The Free pax utilities package offers tape and disk
archivers.
tar 1.12 can be considered stable.
You might also want to look at some fine external pointers, to
discover either complementary or competing packages. The
descriptions are usually limited to free packages, however.
From a letter to Richard Stallman and Sergey, sent on
2003-12-18, in reply to Sergey who was then trying to sort out
the status of the project.
It has been a good while since I worked on Paxutils matters.
All my ideas on the matter, including the overall
plans on which we agreed, are documented (so far that I remember)
within all administrative files and folders I transmitted to Paul
Eggert, together with all Paxutils source in their latest work
state, which did hold extensive changes since the latest Paxutils
pretest.
As a way to cut on all the confusion created by the parallel
releases of tar by Paul while Paxutils was being
pretested, and to fully resist the temptation of ever interfering
with Paul's later decisions and works about Paxutils (I do not
act with others in ways I would not like myself), I deleted
everything related to Paxutils on my side, once Paul told me he
fully secured all the stock I sent him. So, I do not have
anything concrete left of Paxutils, besides my fading memory of
the project.
This is only later, when I progressively realised that Paul
was not to fulfil his repeated promises about unifying
his tar with Paxutils that I became sad
about all the work that was being ignored and lost. I felt
especially bad for all those users who I told that their
contributions were accepted and integrated for the next release
of Paxutils. I never ever intended to lie to them.
About tar, cpio and Paxutils as separate
projects, a bit of history might help at sorting things. John
Oleynick maintained cpio for a good while, and the
transmission of cpio from John to Tom Tromey has been
a long, but successful adventure. At the time, Tom and I were
working at the design of Automake (after an idea from David
Mackenzie) and were intimately collaborating, and we considered
with great pleasure the idea of merging tar and
cpio together. We added a newly rewritten
pax on the way, and chose Paxutils as a neutral name
between tar and cpio. (We also considered
other versions of cpio, tar and
pax ― all our notes should be in the administrative
files).
The cpio in Paxutils was really the most
up-to-date, and was reworked for better integration with the
rest, putting code in common, uniformising style, etc. Restarting
from the latest cpio distribution would clearly be a
backward step, I do not think there is anything to gain
there.
tar itself has a more complex story. Paul started
from an old pretest of Paxutils, modified it heavily on his side
on many aspects, implementing huge file support an a very
Solarishly way (on which I was not much agreeing, should I say).
He then submitted me a single, really big patch. It was
all-mixed, intervowen, unsorted. He probably expected me to apply
it whole, while I wanted to consider each topic of the patch
separately, and told him it would take a good amount of time to
study and process it all. Paul asked me if I would object that he
publishes tar with his patch, separately, for people
in urgent need of using LFS. That was OK with me. Then, Paul
started not only to maintain his patch, but also
reimplement in his tar things that were already
solved in the tar distributed within later Paxutils,
and differently. He went as far as
removing from his tar amounts of
code I wrote in view of large file support on legacy systems. My
code was not aligned along Sun Solaris methods, which Paul
venerates, but my code was meant to be more widely portable. In
my views, Paul challenged and dismissed my maintenance works, so
much that I thought preferable to resign than impose our fight to
the community.
What it means in practice is that the current
tar has been forked from an old pretest of Paxutils,
and so, a merging of both would be useful, given you
can get a hold on Paxutils. I'm sure that Paul made good works
that we cannot ignore (Paul is technically competent, there is no
doubt about this). I also think that Paxutils has good code and
changes to recycle. Merging, if ever, is going to require
courageous work, fairly tedious and unrewarding. In my opinion,
many months of work need to be identified and redone. Paul
despisingly told that for him, two or three days would suffice,
but apparently never found those few days. In the meantime, Paul
acted as if whatever users do not resubmit directly to him, was
not worth anyway.
Repairing POSIX support in tar is the main long
term goal that tar may have. I guess that the
step-wise plan for Paxutils, which was accepted by the FSF, has
been fully abandoned or forgotten with the change of maintainer.
But any plan that has some chance to work is good, in my opinion.
star is also especially interesting in that it uses
efficient techniques for streaming tapes, which techniques could
be recycled for most or all Paxutils tools.
All this being said, Sergey, I can only wish you good courage,
and collaboration from all involved people. I cannot provide much
myself, besides bits of historical background, which may not be
that useful in practice, once you will have found all the files
you need. On the other hand, do not hesitate writing to me if you
think that some discussion might help, yet while I did my best
while being there, you understand I have no responsibility
anymore around tar or Paxutils.
Last modified: 2009-07-07 20:11
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