Subject: Re: bug#13324: Improvements to "dist" targets (was: Re: EXTRA_DIST, directories, tar --exclude-vcs)

From: Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:16:01 +0100

On 01/03/2013 01:57 AM, Karl Berry wrote:
>     > that every tar (except maybe really ancient ones, can't remember, but we
>     > don't care) supports the -style.
>
>     It would be nice to verify this claim on as much systems as possible
>
> Certainly POSIX has always required supporting -options, which is some
> 15 years old at least.  Or do I mean 25?  Either way ...  And in
> practice, every system I've ever used has a system tar supporting
> -options, not just "old-style" options without the -.
>
> Thus I would still propose that Automake always use -options to tar in
> its output, never old-style options.
>
If nobody objects, I can do that for 1.13.2.

> As for tar-v7, tar-ustar, tar-pax ... I don't know.
>
Normalizing that little mess is a long-term work anyway; first, we need
to either determine that the features offered by those options are not
really relevant today, or have an alternative approach that works in
subsuming all the features offered by those options (albeit likely with
a much different API); then we can go to the route of

   deprecation -> runtime warnings -> runtime error -> removal

Process likely to span several releases.

Regards,
  Stefano