two tar issues: man page and --totals behaviour

[Stefan A. Deutscher]

Hi folks,

  just noticed two issues with tar on FreeBSD 5.1 (actually, it is
GNU tar 1.13.25):

(1) The man page is somewhat out of sync with what tar --help shows
    in terms of options

    Should I submit a PR for that one, or send a bug report to the gnu
    tar maintainers, or both?


(2) The option --totals, according to the docs and --help, is supposed
    to show the bytes _written_. It does not quite:

    - When running plain 'tar c', it actually shows the bytes written.

    - When running tar with any of the built-in compression flags, such
      as 'tar -c -{z,Z,y}', it shows the exact same number of bytes as
      when invoked without these flags.
      
    While, technically, it might show the bytes written _to_ the
    compression program, for all practical purposes it appears to show
    what was _read_ from disk. The space used on tape may be
    significantly smaller.

    I understand that for backwards compatibility one cannot just change
    the behaviour of this flag from one day to another. Fixing the docs
    might be the easy way out, but I'd like to suggest the addition of
    some flag that reports what was actually written _to_ the tape
    device.

    Even if the device-internal HW compression may change what actually
    ends up on tape (i.e. compressing uncompressed stuff somewhat while
    probably not gaining anything on gzip or bzip2), this would give a
    better indicator of tape usage and space left on a tape.

    I have no idea whether this  has been discussed here already, google
    didn't like me enough to turn up relevant threads. Nor do I know how
    the upcoming bsdtar handles that flag's behaviour.

    Again, should I submit  a PR for that one, or send a bug report to
    the gnu tar folks, or both?



Cheers,
              Stefan


-- 
this space intentionally left blank