(tar)Why maintaining

MSDOS

Rewriting

Support

Why maintaining it?
-------------------

   I confess that I am a little afraid of `tar' maintainance.  It is
difficult for many reasons, the first tree being more evident than the
others:

   * the algorithmic design was initially oriented for machines having
     very small memory, it was later much adapted for new features
     without doing everything necessary for the whole to stay clean;

   * the wide visibility of `tar' forces many stunts at portability;

   * GNU `tar' has to be sensitive to file systems and device variance.

   * GNU central has been seduced by some users promising to write
     wonderful `tar' replacements, which never came, so development has
     been put aside for years, while bug reports accumulated;

   * the `tar' manual has been withdrawn, promising users a fine
     replacement for it, so raising their expectations;

   * maintenance was once split between four maintainers (one for
     `tar', one for `mt', another for scripts, and a team for
     documentation), and also, `rtapelib.[ch]' from `tar' is used in
     `cpio', and synchronisation has not always been easy.

   However, even if difficult, I do feel like doing a careful cleanup,
so `tar' would become less painful to maintain after a while (and less
subject to criticism).  And besides, I'm surrounded by a marvelous team
of pretesters and by many other collaborating users, which I should
learn to serve better.  Getting more experience with maintainance in
GNU, I hope being careful enough modifying `tar' so not hurting users
too much, being aware that `tar' is a sensitive product in GNU.  Once
cleaned up, I might be happy to return `tar' maintainance to someone
else...

   `tar' requires more work alone that all my other things together,
and I have to resist being swallowed whole in it.  This resistance
makes `tar' development somewhat slower.  Sorry!