Re: Supporting arbitrary file attributes

On Sun, 31 Mar 2002, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> People who like to add support for DOS file flags to the current extended flag
> implementation are welcome.

I doubt that anyone would invest the significant effort required to port 
another Tar program to the DOS environment (or native Windows environment, 
for that matter).  The file flags are the least of your problems: Tar deals 
with intimate details of the underlying filesystem, and thus is generally 
very hard to port to non-Posix systems, given the Posix heritage of the 
mainline code.

I ported GNU Tar 1.12.x to MS-DOS and MS-Windows, and I can tell you that 
it was a kind of effort I would never wish to go through again.  (You can 
see the results at http://www.simtel.net/pub/djgpp/v2gnu/.)  That is why 
I didn't roll back that port into Tar 1.13.x series--the pain of going 
through all that code is just too much for me...

Of course, it could be that star is so much more portable than GNU Tar 
that all my doubts are irrelevant (I never looked at the star sources)...