Date: Mon, 21 Mar 94 14:34:54 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Building blivets. (GNU tar)

(1) A moderately useful version of tar (extract-only) is distributed
with DJGPP.
(2) A complete version of GNU tar is included with Eric Backus's ports
of the GNU utilities.  I forget which file it's in, probably
fileutil.zoo (or filutl??.zoo, I think he included version #s in the
file names).  These utilities were available on
ftp.math.niu.edu::/pub/msdos/djgpp.stuff/.  They're moderately old by
now, but they generally work well.
(3) It should be possible to port more recent versions of tar with
relatively little effort because of improvements in the DJGPP library.
But beware---many OS-specific functions like forks and pipes will fail
with an uninterpretable message.  These functions are included in the
DJGPP library as stubs which simply return an error code.  If you're
lucky, it will be something like "Couldn't fork."  And you'll think,
"Ah, yes, this is MSDOS.  I knew I shoulda switched to Linux."  If
you're unlucky, you may get a stack dump because many older GNU
programs don't use strerror, and an illegal pointer to an error
message which isn't included in the DJGPP include file of error
messages gets passed to printf, and GO32 aborts.  And all you can do
is think "What the hell!?"
    --Steve