Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file

Alexander Viro
2001-12-23T03:52:50Z

On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Dave Cinege wrote:

> On Saturday 22 December 2001 21:10, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> > > cpio is trivial. tar is a bit more painful, but not too bad. gzip is
> > > unacceptable, but should not be required.
> >
> > tar is ugly as hell and not going to be supported on the kernel side.
>
> Excellent! You've settled on using using an archiver format nobody uses,
> instead of the defacto standard that's already been implemented by
> atleast two people.
> G-E-N-I-U-S!

OK, back into the killfile you go.

Hint: instead of wanking in public try to _think_ for a while. Requirements
to archive format:
* can be generated with minimum of code
* can be parsed <ditto>
* can be handled by standard utilities
That's it. Both cpio(1) and tar(1) (or pax(1) that can do both) fit the last
one. And tar loses on the first two - it's messier. Not much, but enough
to make the choice obvious. "Popular" is completely irrelevant here - as long
as it's handled by standard UNIX utilities it's OK.