Subject: [bug#52109] Mention bsdcat, bsdcpio and bsdtar in description of libarchive

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2023 16:09:31 +0100

Hi,

On Sat, 21 Jan 2023 at 18:59, Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> Please find attach the patch. :-)  If it appears to you fine, could
>> you merge it?
>
> Hmm, I fear that this line doesn't do much except helping folk to grep
> for "bsdtar" et al.  Should we perhaps explain in a sentence or two
> what those commands do?

It is not ’grep’ but “guix search” so it is only an internal SEO. ;-)

>From my point of view, some explanations about what these commands do
are done by the man pages.

Well, this trivial patch is just a quick workaround at 2 levels.  One,
because Guix File Search [1] is almost done but not very popular yet.

Two, because this libarchive should be split into 2 different packages
or outputs: one for the library itself and another for the commands.

1: <https://yhetil.org/guix/[email-masked]>

However, if a table containing what these utilities do seems
appropriated, here the description from the Debian package
’libarchive-tools’:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
The bsdtar program is the default system 'tar' program used on
FreeBSD. bsdtar uses the libarchive library as a backend which does all
of the work for reading and writing archives in various formats.

The bsdcpio program is the default system 'cpio' program used on
FreeBSD. bsdcpio uses the libarchive library as a backend which does all
of the work for reading and writing archives in various formats

The bsdcat program reads archived data from files or from its standard
input and uses the libarchive library to decompresses it to its standard
output. It may be used for viewing the contents of archives or for
passing it to other tools for further processing.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Cheers,
simon