FS#39733 - [tar] 1.27.1-1 does not provide a proper man page
Attached to Project:
Arch Linux
Opened by Patrick Goetz (pgoetz) - Thursday, 03 April 2014, 21:37 GMT
Last edited by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera) - Thursday, 01 May 2014, 19:38 GMT
Opened by Patrick Goetz (pgoetz) - Thursday, 03 April 2014, 21:37 GMT
Last edited by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera) - Thursday, 01 May 2014, 19:38 GMT
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Details
Description:
The man page for tar is not the man page but rather a description of the tar file format. There will already be some confusion about the difference between bsdtar (which is actually libarchive tar and not BSD tar at all) and GNU tar. Not having a proper man page for tar adds to the confusion. There are differences which matter; e.g. GNU tar supports -d (--diff) while libarchive tar does not. Additional info: * package version: tar 1.27.1-1 |
This task depends upon
Closed by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera)
Thursday, 01 May 2014, 19:38 GMT
Reason for closing: Upstream
Thursday, 01 May 2014, 19:38 GMT
Reason for closing: Upstream
man tar
gave a bizarre answer. I strongly suspect other people coming from other distributions will have the same experience. Is this because upstream isn't supplying a man page? If so, this is a case where a distribution-specific patch (adding the man page) is highly warranted.
upgpkg: tar 1.27-1
upstream update, remove man page not supplied by upstream
I assumed that the reason there's no man page for GNU tar is because it's not being supplied by upstream. This seems like a case where a patch is warranted (i.e. this meets the criteria of stay as close to upstream *as possible*); namely just harvest the tar man page used by debian/red hat/etc. and add it to the package as a patch. Tar is a fairly critical piece of linux infrastructure, and as I mentioned, libarchive bsdtar and GNU tar are not feature identical. Some people have a lot of infrastructure built up around GNU tar and will be dismayed if they start migrating machines to Arch and find that there is no GNU tar man page. I have no idea why the FSF has a bug up their ass about man pages; probably still sore that the info system was never widely adopted. They should get over it; that battle was lost well over 10 years ago.
There's your manpage.
That's more of a mantome. <:)
The problem with using the Debian man page is that it is for a version that is always behind ours. New flags do get added and it is too much burden to update the man page.
GNU tar maintainers have specifically rejected a man page. This is an upstream decision and we should follow it.
$ man tar
*not* be a description of the archival format (that's really confusing) but rather a stub which tells user's something like this:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The FSF does not provide a man page for this application. Please try
info tar | less
instead, or consult https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I wouldn't have filed a bug report if this is what happened when I typed `man tar` myself.
Because I already know that they don't care and won't do anything about this. Debian requires a man page for everything, even if the man page is "there is no man page". This isn't a bad policy to follow.