As I said, I want to create a virtual/tar to allow people to choose between GNU tar and bsdtar.
The reason of this is that I like bsdtar more than GNU tar, and I feel like it better suits the base user profile, as for example it does not provide the rmt script or similar thingies that are not requested by normal users.
Also, this will allow the de-GNUification of Linux 😛 No really, this is another step toward the “don’t be pissy about the GNU/* thing”, as one can actually get rid of a GNU package.
Right now I was able to get the two respect the /bin/tar symlink, so I can effectively have /bin/tar not being overwritten every time.
The next step is to find a way to tell “externally” which other package provides a command, so that I can recreate /bin/tar if I remove one of the two using the other one. I have to find a way to handle this so that I can do that within an ebuild without using eselect, as I don’t want to add it to RDEPEND for tar. But then, it must be parseable with eselect, too, as I want it to find out which commands can be selected and how.
Updates in the next days.
