(tar)Rewriting

Why maintaining

Stability

Support

Should we rewrite the thing?
----------------------------

   Working in `tar' sources is not always pleasurable.  The problem is
that `tar' sources are very fragile.  Just cleaning around breaks
things.  The current sequence of prereleases is for slowly trying to
solidify it, so `tar' becomes more maintainable.  I think that the
ugliness of sources could be corrected to a certain extent, too.

   A few efforts to replace GNU `tar' have been done already and it
seems that all failed so far.  A toy program, for me, is another kind
of failure.  I think people underestimate the number of portability
problems such a program can raise.  This is not only a matter of
programming style, there is really a wide variability in systems out
there.  GNU `tar' has a long history, met a rich variety of porting
problems, machine peculiarities, system idiosyncrasies, which are
unrelated to programming style.  My own opinion is that we cannot
dismiss all the experience gleaned along the years, and saved (if not
hidden) in GNU `tar' sources, pretending to start anew, from scratch.

   Even if a new program replacing GNU `tar' would be marvelous, GNU
`tar' stalled for a few years waiting for such a program, and we are
now faced to nothing, with hundreds of user reports to catch on.  We
need a working archiver *now*, and cannot live on promises.  Any new
program will take hundreds of user reports, and many years, to
stabilize enough to become a plausible `tar' replacement.  I rather
plan to clean up GNU `tar'.  This alone is a big task for me, because
GNU `tar' coding is not ideal, and I have to find ways to transform it
slowly, while having it fully working at all times.