Re: Autoconf distributions and xz dependency

[Warren Young]

On 3/2/2012 8:16 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Friday 02 March 2012 20:08:54 James K. Lowden wrote:
> > On Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:48:07 -0700 Warren Young wrote:
> > > I still use systems[*] that don't have tar -J,
> >
> > Exactly.  And learning yet another unizipping command line is not now
> > and never will be worth my time.  It might become necessary, but that's
> > another story.
>
> that's a weak argument.  the command line interface to gzip/bzip2/xz are
> largely the same on purpose.  the -d -c -z -f -k -[0..9] -l -v -V -q -t -h
> flags all do the same thing, and really most people use a very small subset of
> those.
>
> xz -dc foo.tar.xz | tar xf -
> xzcat foo.tar.xz | tar xf -

That's great, if your fingers are trained to do separate decompression 
and untarring.  Mine aren't.  They're trained to type "tar xvzf".

Even having to remember to use "tar xvjf" for .bz2 is enough of a pain 
that I frequently get it wrong.  Now you're asking me to switch again to 
"tar xvJf", which won't even work if I'm on a system older than a few 
years gone.

Or you've got your other solution, which is entirely retrain myself to 
use separate decompression and untarring, in which case you add half a 
dozen or more characters to each command.  Thanks a lot, just what I wanted.

I disagree with James' solution to add xz to libgzip.  However, I do 
wonder why GNU tar can't be smart enough to figure out what you meant 
when untarring with -z?  I get why we need -j and -J for creating 
archives, but when unpacking them, what's wrong with using magic numbers 
to detect the compression format?  (I know, off topic.  No need to 
reply, just venting.)

Now get off my lawn. :)