Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

[Don Lewis]

On 14 Jan, Robert Watson wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> All this generally sounds good.
> 
>> LIBARCHIVE BACKGROUND
>> 
>> As many of you know, I've been working on a project to overhaul the pkg
>> tools.  Among many other things, this requires a library that can
>> read/write tar archives.  This avoids the significant overhead imposed
>> from forking a separate tar program. 
> 
> If you become a bored person requiring entertainment, it might be quite
> interesting to create a read-only tarfs for use as a root file system
> loaded in an md device.  While there's a lot more to it than this, one of
> the more irritating things about our current release build is that it
> requires privilege so that it can chroot(), but also so it can manage md
> devices and file system images.  Just being able to use a tarball instead
> of a UFS image would go a long way, although presumably require changes to
> our loader as well.  For work with diskless systems and network booting,
> I'd much rather stick a tarball on an NFS server than create UFS images.
> 
> I know NetBSD has a neat tool to create file systems from userspace
> without privilege, but my understanding is that it has to pull in a lot of
> code from the kernel in fairly messy ways.  Since tar files are a well
> supported portable format... :-)

Why not use iso9660?  The userland code already exists to create it and
the file system code already exists to read it.