Re: cpio vs. tar. was: OSR5 install of 971031

[Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>]

  In message <19971104091607.20107@dgii.com>you write:
  > Is it really worth the bother?    Isn't cpio one of those utilities 
  > that's been around since UNIX was distributed on clay tablets?
Yes, but many systems in the past did't have cpio.

And, my linux box doesn't seem to have it either.  I guess that's
a package I didn't install :-)


  >  Even though X/open has marked it "to be withdrawn" and SUSv2 tags
  > it as "legacy" suggesting that "Applications should migrate to the
  > pax utility.", would any OS vendor not ship cpio?
Lots used to not ship cpio, that's changed over time.

  > If we were to do anything more ambitious autoconf-ish, would it be 
  > any wiser to test for pax and use it instead of either tar or cpio?
  > Then we'd have three different install-headers-* targets, and I doubt
  > that would be a lot of fun, either.
I'd prefer to just stick with tar/cpio between those two we should
have every significant unix covered.

I wouldn't object to removing the "B" from the tar options and then
removing cpio support -- I'm not aware of a system that doesn't ship
tar (then again, maybe you are :-)

jeff