Re: [bu-users] Um... Pax?

[Vincent S. <bu...@hi...>]

On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 12:30:51PM +0100, Stefan Morrell wrote:
> On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 11:16:08PM -0500, Vincent Stemen wrote:
> > The different linux distributions seem to use there own versioning for
> > it.  I thought most of them already included pax.  I am currently
> 
> I think Redhat and Debian do, I'm not sure about the rest. I guess SuSE does
> as the source I have was a port for SuSE.
> 
> Of course I have to be awkward and roll my own source distro :)

Oh yea, I remember you saying that before.  Just out of curiosity, do
you distribute it publicly?  If so what is the name of it?  If you make
pax available with it, perhaps I could mention it in the docs and put
a link to it.


> > Interestingly, after getting your email, I looked at the rcs id strings
> > on the Debian Linux pax, using the strings command (don't seem to have
> > the ident utility on Debian and haven't figured out what package to
> > install to get it), and it is apparently actually a pretty old version
> > from OpenBSD.  It shows "$OpenBSD: pax.c,v 1.14 1998/09/20".
> 
> I couldn't find ident on my system either, but the my version has the
> following (nearest equivalent) from "strings".
> 
> $Id: vis.c,v 1.2 2005/07/29 07:59:12 kukuk Exp $
> 
> I don't think it's a major issue and it does seem to work with the version of
> pax I've installed - you might want to mention the pax dependancy in the docs
> though, maybe with a link to source code.

I don't have a link to the source code, but it is mentioned in the bu
docs.  In the Readme, under Dependencies, it says "perl version 5.x and
pax".  Also, in the Changlog, there is a detailed explination of "Why
I chose pax", if you are interested.


> Of course finding the source code is complicated by the fact that there is a 
> set of Linux Kernel patches called PaX so search terms like "pax source linux"
> turn up a lot of stuff you didn't want - however the link I gave in my 
> previous missive should do the job.

I did a search for "pax archiver" on google, and it turned up 129,000
hits :-).  The third hit down was a link called "RPM resource /usr/bin/pax"
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=%2Fusr%2Fbin%2Fpax
which seems to have pax binary packages for all the different
Linux distributions that use rpm, and, some of the html links in the
left column (the ones that weren't broken) take you to pages that have
links to download the associated source rpm.  Of course, I don't care
for having to deal with rpm packages for sources though.

Further down, on the google page, under the link, "Pax - POSIX File
System Archiver", there was a link for the source for the Debian port,
pax_1.5.orig.tar.gz.
http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/Debian/Other/pax_1.5.orig.tar.gz.117613.html
It is a bunch of links to mirror sites that have it.  Although the
Debian one is apparently pretty old, it still works.

You are right though, It does seem to be hard to track down
a non-distribution specific modern source package for Linux.  You could
start with the native BSD source, although, it might take some porting
to setup a makefile that works in the Linux environment.  

If you don't come up with any other viable options and want the newer
one, the easiest approach would probably be to extract it from one of
the rpm source packages, make sure it compiles and works, and re-package
the source as a standard tar.gz file.  If you do that, I would be
interested in getting a copy from you to put on our site, or linking to
it on your site.

Regards,
Vincent

-- 
Vincent Stemen
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