About the pax utility

[Pierre Labastie]

pax is a package archiver required by the LSB. Presently, we use an old version from the heirloom library. There is a more recent (and seemingly maintained) one at ​http://www.mirbsd.org/pax.htm.

But looking at the documentation, tar can produce pax (posix 2001) compatible format. So maybe pax could be a shell script calling GNU tar with the appropriate options...

Note: the ​pax format and its relationship with ustar and cpio formats.

Also, look at bsdtar instead of GNU tar...

This ticket is for reporting findings about those.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Just took a look at this. Other distros seem to be using pax-3.4. I downloaded

​http://downloads.yoctoproject.org/mirror/sources/pax-3.4.tar.bz2

This seems to be older than the version we are using. The youngest filestamp in the package is Aug 2005 (vs Jul 2007 for heirloom pax that we are using.)

Arch has 8 patches for pax-3.4. We only have a convenience sed.

I don't know anyone who actually uses pax. Perhaps that's the reason it hasn't been updated in over a decade. I'd say having it in the book is just a formality due to the LSB.

I suggest marking as wontfix.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 20045.