suggestion: improving tar on macosx

[Paulo Abreu]

Hi:

I feel a bit strange to post a suggestion to an address for bugs 
(bug-gnu-utils) but this is the address I found on the tar manual for 
suggestions. I hope it is really the right place for suggestions about tar.

My suggestion is simple: what about making tar work with resource forks 
under macosx/darwin?

Under macosx, the resource fork for a file named A is called A/..namedfork/
rsrc. This is a filename, not a dir hierarchy. My suggestion is to add an 
option like --macosx or --darwin, that would deal with the resource fork at 
least for the create and update commands passed to tar: for every file A, 
tar would look for a corresponding A/..namedfork/rsrc and, if it existed 
(and needed to be updated), would include it.

The need for the --macosx option with other commands is not so crucial. If 
the resource fork is in the tar file, then it could be processed as any 
other file: listed, extracted, verified, ...

I have been looking at the tar source (1.13.17) and I am a bit relutant to 
try to implement this myself. The dump_file function looks so complicated 
I just don't know where to start -- I am pretty unexperience in programming.
 This is why I decided to suggest this here. Perhaps some of you developers 
might like to implement this. If not, perhaps you could have some 
suggestions on how to implement this. A bit of clarification on how the 
dump_file funtion works would surely help a lot.

Implementing this is quite important. Right now, there is not a good backup 
tool for macosx. The GUI ones can't access the Unix side of macosx (and are 
usually not powerfull enough), and the Unix ones (tar, cpio, pax,...) can'
t access the resource fork of files. There is an implementation of pax that 
does this, called hfspax:
http://homepage.mac.com/howardoakley/
However, it has several limitations and only works with the cpio format.

I love tar, I have finally become experienced in using the incremental 
backup (-G) efficiently and I'd love to be able to use it to backup my 
macosx.

Thanks for your attention,

Paulo


_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com