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Probably because a lot of scripts and other software has written that calls tar without a hyphen in the options, and it seems strange to break them for no other
by ninkendo 4y ago
Probably because a lot of scripts and other software has written that calls tar without a hyphen in the options, and it seems strange to break them for no other reason than it seems better to you. If you want to change behavior and make a better tar with saner option behavior, you can do so, just don’t call it “tar”.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoI fully understand how we got here, but it is still frustrating. POSIX was not a gift from the gods, but a descriptive this-is-how-thing-are. There should not be any sacred cows, and there needs to be a way to eventually break backwards compatibility and remove the cruft.
- dwheeler 4y ago> there needs to be a way to eventually break backwards compatibility and remove the cruft. Actually, no. There's always a cost/benefit ratio. You can easily create a beautiful, elegant system repateadly forcing backwards incompatibility. In fact, that has been done - see the history of "Plan 9". Even the developers of Unix couldn't just throw away backwards compatibility in the name of elegance at any cost. I think you do sometimes want to break backwards compatibility, but there'd better be a good reason for it & the pain needs to be minimized for users. If users repeatedly undergo pain from a system, they will stop being users. One of the most important rules for the Linux kernel is "don't break userspace".