On Apr 19, 2008, at 8:13 AM, devzero2000 wrote:

> I personally find much  interesting the last discussion, as a  
> general rpm improvement of course. Maybe at a certain historical  
> moment the battle  tar vs star was  due to selinux problems (xtattr  
> and the like). It is obviously a hypothesis. But maybe these  
> problems that  were present are not such any more or, almost, with  
> minor problem (http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/07/02/tips-from- 
> an-rhce-tar-vs-star-the-battle-of-xattrs/)
>
> Ma perhaps this are patch not upstream: to do verified.
>
> But the discussion could deviate again..................
>
> Best Regards
>

Part of the reason for preferring star over tar around a RHEL4 time
frame was the ability to save xattr's (and other information like  
ACL's), yes.

The major reason for avoiding star has to do with the maintainer and
politics. The star code itself has always been high performing,
innovative, well maintained, etc. And extremely well marketed
to put it mildly.

I personally think that tar as a format is rather terrible and  
inefficient.
Blocking to 512b buffers for all reads is extremely useful for designing
hardware buffers for DMA transfers to serial tape drives and is  
otherwise
largely pointless. The main advantage of tar over its hysterical  
rival cpio
is ease of use. I still have to read cpio(1) to figger out how to  
use, 20 years later.
But perhaps that's a fault of mine, not cpio implementations.

And there's ar(1), but I'll leave the advantages of that bizzare  
format to dpkg fan-boys
and static library devotee's. Wotta mess is my personal opinion.

I point you at XAR if interested in backups of additional data like  
xattr's and ACL's
and plists. I don't know of any other implementation that alrerady  
supports as
wide a variety of existing platfom  xattr's/acl's, is as simple to  
use as tar,
and can be extended to handle new per-file metadata rather easily.

XAR does have the advantage of not being mired with hysterical  
"standard"
legacy baggage. If "standard" compliance is of interest, XAR is not  
for you.

Which is largely why I like XAR not only for its payload handling,  
but also
for the ability to represent package metadata.

73 de Jeff