libtarfile (Was Re: pkg_create broken by design?)

[Tim Kientzle]

Julian Elischer wrote:
> Sometimes it's a pain to have to install the package before one can
> build it..
> 
> The trouble is that both the @srcdir and the @cwd produce 
> '-C [dir]' to be added to the 'tar' command list
> 
> I see several possible fixes..

Another alternative:  stop trying to use a separate 'tar'
program.  The attached is a functional alpha of "libtarfile", which
provides a pretty clean API for building and reading tar archives (complete
with gzip or bzip2 compression).  In particular, this could be
incorporated into pkg_create to address both of the problems you described:

* Remove the need to install a package before
   creating the package file.  In particular, using this library,
   you can separate the filename written into the
   library from the file used as a source of data.
* Remove problems with building 'tar' command lines.

On the read side, this library eliminates most of
tar's historic limitations (by supporting 'pax extended'
format archives and a couple of extensions used by GNU tar
and star).  These extensions have not yet been fully
implemented for writing archives, though I do plan
to implement the 'pax extended' format.  (The hooks are
all in place; I'm just missing a few hundred lines of code.)

The source code includes a very minimal standalone tar
program.  If anyone is interested in trying to complete
it, please let me know.

I am working on a complete replacement for pkg_add
using this library.  So far, it's working pretty well,
though I'm now looking at some complicated issues of
package management, version control, and the like.
I have some ideas for handling these issues, but there's
still a lot of code to be written.

Updating pkg_create should be much simpler, though it's not something
I'll be able to look into for quite a while.  Again, if someone would
like to use this library to improve pkg_create, let me know.
(In particular, this will encourage me to find time to polish the
write support.)

Feedback much appreciated,

Tim Kientzle
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