Tar output mode for installworld

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-07-14 13:20, Tim Kientzle <tim at kientzle.com> wrote:
> I saw this project suggestion on www.freebsd.org:
>
> <http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/#p-taroutmode>
>
> and thought I'd contribute a couple of ideas and notes:
>
> This is easy to implement using a trick that I stumbled across
> a few years ago.  The idea is to just build a description of
> the final archive in a nice verbose text format such as:
>
> <file> <keyword> <data>
>
> E.g.,
>
> bin/sh file /usr/obj/usr/src/bin/sh
> bin/sh uname root
> bin/sh gname wheel
> rescue/mkdir hardlink rescue/rescue
> bin/sh mode 0666
> bin/rcp mode 04666

This looks vaguely similar to the package 'prototype' files which
Solaris uses for creating packages.  I've written quite a few of
them at ${realjob}, so if it looks interesting as a 'file list'
format, I can help with the details.

A packaging list for one of the distributions I've built at work
includes stuff like:

    # Misc command-line tools in @prefix@/bin/...
    d none @prefix@/bin 0755 root bin
    f none @prefix@/bin/progname-2.0 0755 root bin
    s none @prefix@/bin/progname=progname-2.0

Something like this, which includes all the bits for a single
file in one line may be nice even for mtree and verification of
files installed :)