Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file

[Alexander Viro]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Dave Cinege wrote:

> On Saturday 22 December 2001 21:10, Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
> > > cpio is trivial.  tar is a bit more painful, but not too bad.  gzip is
> > > unacceptable, but should not be required.
> >
> > tar is ugly as hell and not going to be supported on the kernel side.
> 
> Excellent! You've settled on using using an archiver format nobody uses,
> instead of the defacto standard that's already been implemented by
> atleast two people.
> 			G-E-N-I-U-S!

OK, back into the killfile you go.

Hint: instead of wanking in public try to _think_ for a while.  Requirements
to archive format:
	* can be generated with minimum of code
	* can be parsed <ditto>
	* can be handled by standard utilities
That's it.  Both cpio(1) and tar(1) (or pax(1) that can do both) fit the last
one.  And tar loses on the first two - it's messier.  Not much, but enough
to make the choice obvious.  "Popular" is completely irrelevant here - as long
as it's handled by standard UNIX utilities it's OK.