On the state of 'tar'

[hasufell]

Friends,

'tar' [0][1] is an excellent native haskell implementation of the tar
format. However, there are currently a lot of unattended issues:

* unicode filepaths broken due to Char8 use [2]
* executable bits handled improperly [3]
* no support for long filepath extension [4][5]
* doesn't handle hardlinks properly [6]
* handles symbolic links too strictly [7]

Most of these issues are 2 to 4 years old, some of them have PRs that
have never been reviewed.

'tar' fails to unpack our own ghc bindists even [4]. I consider it, in
this state, too unreliable for production use. Since it is in the
'haskell' namespace on github and probably the first hit on hackage,
this needs to be improved quickly, IMO.

Users currently can use tar-bytestring [8] (no windows support) or
libarchive [9] (not a native implementation), but 'tar' should
ultimately be fixed and maintained properly.

--
[0] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tar
[1] https://github.com/haskell/tar
[2] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/6
[3] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/25
[4] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/49
[5] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/27
[6] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/51
[7] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/32
[8] https://github.com/hasufell/tar-bytestring
[9] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/libarchive
--


Cheers,
Julian