In a previous thread Nitro showed me this nice tool for extracting files out of NeXTish install packages: /NextAdmin/Installer.app/installer_bigtar
Does anyone know of any open source tool that can handle this modified tar format correctly?
Alternatively is there any documentation on the modified tar format?
Try to open the patch tar file with gnutar, Opener for NEXTSTEP, or OpenUp for OPENSTEP and see if any of them work. You might be able to determine the source of the code by loading the program into a hex editor and looking for any plain text that might offer a clue.
I don't know of any documentation for the program, and one post that I read on Usenet suggested that it might not even be a full implementation of tar. If you run the program without any command line arguments it will give a short list of the correct command syntax.
Both NeXT and Apple had legal reservations about using
tar. NeXT used their own
tar-like implementation as I recall and Apple tried using
pax.
OpenUp for Mac OS X (
http://homepage.mac.com/sanguish/OpenUp/) might also work if you are attempting to disassemble these packages before moving them to a NeXT system.
Quote from: "RacerX"Both NeXT and Apple had legal reservations about using tar.
RacerX, this is interesting. What were those legal reservations?
I found a little bit of documentation on bigtar.
QuoteThe package utility has the following command-line syntax (bracketed arguments are optional):
package [ -B ] [ -f ] root-dir info-file [ tiff-file ] [ -d destination-dir ]
Arguments:
-B Indicates that the bigtar program should be used to create the package, instead of regular tar. This is necessary only if the package contains files with pathnames greater than 100 characters. (Note that if this option is used, the LongFileNames field in the MyApp.info file should have the value YES. See "Installer Package Specification for Single-Volume Packages" for more information.
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/Developer/Creating_Packages/Preparing_an_Application_for_Installation_by_the_Installer.pdf
Quote from: "RacerX"Both NeXT and Apple had legal reservations about using tar. NeXT used their own tar-like implementation as I recall and Apple tried using pax.
OpenUp for Mac OS X (http://homepage.mac.com/sanguish/OpenUp/) might also work if you are attempting to disassemble these packages before moving them to a NeXT system.
I've tried gnutar, OpenUp and, pax to no avail... I was hoping to find something that would let me extract the contents that ran under linux... oh well perhaps I'll have to roll-my-own :-)
Quote from: "eagle"Quote from: "RacerX"Both NeXT and Apple had legal reservations about using tar.
RacerX, this is interesting. What were those legal reservations?
Actually, I'm not sure. Even people who worked at NeXT/Apple weren't given a straight answer on this, and a lot of people were upset at the use of
pax in the installer starting with Rhapsody 5.3.
If I was to venture a guess (and this is nothing more than a guess) I would say that it was most likely a an attitude of distrust of any software they didn't have a firm license for. There are still people (lawyers) who dislike any form of the open source licensing (even the BSD style) today.
Obviously there was a significant amount of pressure from the non-lawyers at Apple to move more in that direction (Rhapsody 5.2 was the foundation of Darwin), so a different attitude eventually prevailed.
But even the opening of OpenStep back around 1993 was more Sun's efforts than NeXT's. So I would guess it was a culture that had persisted with the legal department more than anything else.
Sorry, that most likely wasn't very informative.