On Thursday 10 September 2009 11:12:20 Per Jessen wrote:
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
tar or cpio in the Single UNIX Specification. Both tar and cpio have been marked "LEGACY" since at least 1998.
Which hasn't stopped rpm and initramfs from using cpio :-)
While I could certainly be wrong, I believe rpm (both the application and file format) was around before cpio was marked "LEGACY". Not breaking things is often reason enough to continue to use "LEGACY" software. In any case, the file formats are not marked "LEGACY" in SUS, just the "cpio" and "tar" utilities. The file formats are documented under the "pax" utility and will (I imagine) probably be supported for quite a while. The tools that build RPMs and initRAMfs files could be updated to use pax, assuming the processes that consume the data are expecting standard cpio format files, and not some odd GNU (or other non-standard) variant. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/