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SubjectRe: [tar] us.kernel.org mirroring inconsistency
On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, Riley Williams wrote:

kemner> BEFORE you make wild statements like the following, PLEASE try it
kemner> for yourself, before you decide to post your "authoritative"
kemner> reponse to this mailing list.
rhw>
rhw> I most certainly DID try doing "man tar" and found the very fact I
rhw> pointed out clearly stated therein. I've just done so again, and I
rhw> quote from the tar manpage:

But you didn't try "tar xvv" which if you had (with a recent tar) you
would have found it worked.
Man pages are good for finding new options, or finding out what options
do, but if someone says "try this, it works" you DON'T say "you are wrong,
the manpage says so" without trying it for yourself.
As you are hopefully fully aware, most developers hate writing
documentation so the docs are usually out of date, so they could have
added that feature up to 6 months ago, and the manpage wouldn't have been
updated to reflect it.

"It's a feature, not a bug"

rhw> Q> OTHER OPTIONS
rhw> Q> :
rhw> Q> -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F
rhw> Q> use archive file or device F (default /dev/rmt0)
rhw>
rhw> Perhaps you can advise whether that comment is in YOUR tar manpage as
rhw> well?

yes it is, but also the statement:

BUGS
The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create
info documents instead. The maintainer of tar falls into
this category. This man page is neither complete, nor
current, and was included in the Debian Linux packaging of
tar entirely to reduce the frequency with which the lack
of a man page gets reported as a bug in our defect track
ing system.

rhw> 1. I very rarely say either, and I believe this is only the fifth
rhw> time in two years that I've done so.

I disagree with that, I've seen you say that quite a few more times, but
that is not the issue.. What annoyed me, was that when someone, who IMHO
has a very good reputation on this list, posted an example of "this is an
easier way to do X" you shot him down without even checking to see whether
his command actually worked.

rhw> I've posted far more than
rhw> five emails in that time...

Unfortunately that is the case.

rhw> 2. The evidence indicates that I'm NOT wrong on this occasion as
rhw> the tar manpage appears to state exactly what I said it does.

Again, the manpage is NOT a defining standard that the programmers have to
stick to, like the posix manuals etc, it is just some documentation
written by someone else to try and help people new to the program
understand how to use it. The tar manpage is not unique in that respect,
a large proportion of our documentation is

a) not written by the original authors and
b) out of date and/or incorrect.

rhw> > rhw> but if the tar manpage is any guide,
rhw>
rhw> Note that line...

Yes! A "guide" not a "koran" (no offense intended to any islamic readers
of this list)

rhw> Which is true /dev/rmt0 doesn't exist on my system...

Nor mine.. But obviously someone has modified tar to default to stdin
instead.. Not that hard, and as you point out most systems don't even have
a /dev/rmt0.
Maybe it's a Debian specific patch to tar. Have you tried it on your
system yet to see if it actually works?

kemner> Works fine for me.
kemner> Version: 1.12-6
rhw>
rhw> In other words, the tar manpage is wrong? Perhaps it should be
rhw> corrected...

Yes, it needs a major overhaul. (one of the little side-projects I was
working on, before I realised that I don't yet know enough about tar, nor
do I currently have the time to work on it, so I've put it on the
backburner for the time being, hoping someone else would step up and fix
it instead)

kemner> That line works too, but requires an extra 3 characters that are
kemner> unneeded, at least for recent versions of tar.
rhw>
rhw> At least the manpage is right about something then 8-)

Of course, I believe almost everything in the manpage will work, but there
are some "hidden" commands that haven't made it into the manpages yet.

Some would call that a bug. I would call it a feature.
(Although I would call it a bug of the documentation, which in this case
even the documentation agrees is the case)

rhw> One thing though: If they were to be online for (say) 72 hours
rhw> non-stop, would anybody complain?

Nope.

jupiter:~$ f -m snip
Login: snip Name: SNIP Computer Service
Directory: /home/members Shell: /usr/local/bin/staticmenu
Office: Permanent Connection
On since Thu Dec 31 06:24 (WST) on ttyFc from 26400
2 hours 23 minutes idle
No mail.
No Plan.
jupiter:~$ date
Fri Jan 8 08:33:41 WST 1999

This guy's been on for over 194 hours on a standard telephone line. We
sell it as a permanent connection, but as far as Telstra knows it's just a
normal phone call.
(no, he's not really called snip, but you know, customer privacy and all :)

Anyway, this is getting way off topic for this list, so this will be the
last post of mine on this issue.

- Matt


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