readme(tardy)							 readme(tardy)



NAME
       tardy version 1.25 - a tar post-processor
       Copyright  (C)  1993,  1994,  1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
       2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011	Peter Miller

       The tardy program is distributed	under the terms	 of  the  GNU  General
       Public License.	See the	LICENSE	section, below,	for more details.

       tardy a., slow to act, behind time.

DESCRIPTION
       The tardy program is a tar(1) post-processor.  It may be	used to	manip-
       ulate the file headers in tar(5)	archive	files in various ways.

       The reason the tardy program was	written	was because the	author	wanted
       to  "spruce up" his tar files before posting them to the	net, mostly to
       remove artefacts	of the development  environment,  without  introducing
       more.

       The tardy program was designed to allow you to alter certain character-
       istics of files AFTER they have been included in	the TAR	 file.	 Among
       them are:

       * change	file owner (by NUMBER or NAME)
       * change	file group (by NUMBER or NAME)
       * add directory prefix (dot is a	really useful prefix)
       * change	file protections (for example from 600 to 644)

       Note that all of	these affect ALL files in the archive.

BUILDING
       Instructions on how to build and	test the tardy program are to be found
       in the BUILDING file included in	this distribution.

LICENSE
       The tardy program is free software; you can redistribute	it and/or mod-
       ify  it	under the terms	of the GNU General Public License as published
       by the Free Software Foundation;	either version 3 of  the  License,  or
       (at your	option)	any later version.

       The  tardy  program  is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
       but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the  implied  warranty  of  MER-
       CHANTABILITY  or	FITNESS	FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General
       Public License for more details.

       You should have received	a copy of the GNU General Public License along
       with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

       It should be in the LICENSE file	included in this distribution.

AUTHOR
       Peter Miller   EMail:   pmiller@opensource.org.au
       /\/\*		WWW:   http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/

RELEASE	NOTES
   Version 1.25	(2011-Nov-07)
       * Dagobert  Michelsen  <dam@opencsw.org>	discovered that	several	string
	 functions were	undeclared on Solaris,	causing	 build	problems;  and
	 that  there  was  no  replacement  memmem() function for systems that
	 didn't	have one.

   Version 1.24	(2011-Oct-03)
       * The tardy(1) command is now more tolerant  of	tar(5)	archives  that
	 contain regular files labeled LD_DIRECTORY instead of LD_NORMAL.

   Version 1.23	(2011-Sep-09)
       * Thomas	 <metaf4@users.askja.de> discovered that the V7	tar output was
	 using an incorrect link flag when writing file	headers	 for  directo-
	 ries, causing pax(1) and star(1) to complain.

       * Thomas	<metaf4@users.askja.de>	discovered that	the BSD	tar output was
	 using an incorrect link flag when writing file	headers	 for  directo-
	 ries, causing mc(1) and Xarchiver(1) to complain.

       * Dagobert  Michelsen  <dam@opencsw.org>	 discovered a build problem on
	 systems without the strverscmp(3) function.

   Version 1.22	(2011-May-14)
       * Thomas	<metaf4@users.askja.de>	contributed a patch to detect  reading
	 from  a terminal, or writing to a terminal. These are usually indica-
	 tions that the	user has failed	to supply a command line argument.

       * Tardy is now able to read and write long  file	 names	in  ar(1)  ar-
	 chives.

       * A  bug	has been fixed in the BSD ar(1)	format archives, the file pad-
	 ding has been corrected to 2-byte boundaries.

       * The ar(1) padding now uses newlines, to be compatible with GNU	 binu-
	 tils.

       * The  ./configure  script  will	 now  fail  if libexplain has not been
	 installed, rather than	failing	later in the build.

   Version 1.21	(2011-Mar-21)
       * Tardy is now able to automatically gunzip(1) input files gzip(1) out-
	 put files.

       * Tardy is now able to read and write several ar(1) file	formats.

       * Tardy is now able to read and write several cpio(1) file formats.

       * There is a new	tardy -relative-paths filter, it may be	used to	ensure
	 that all file names in	the archive are	relative (do not start with  a
	 '/'  slash  character).  This is tidier that the "-prefix ." alterna-
	 tive.

       * Tardy now uses	libexplain for improved	error messages.
	 http://libexplain.sourceforge.net/

       * There is a new	Tardy -extract option, that may	be used	to extract the
	 contents of an	archive, in any	format that Tardy understands.

       * Thomas	 <metaf4@users.askja.de>  submitted  a patch that added	better
	 output	support	for the	USTAR archive format on.

       * Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net> reported several spelling errors im
	 the man page, these have been corrected.

   Version 1.20	(2010-May-22)
       * A build problem on FreeBSD has	been fixed.

       * A build problem on Debian has been fixed.

   Version 1.19	(2010-Mar-10)
       *  The  Makefile.in  file has been fixed	so the package now builds cor-
       rectly.	Additional support  for	 building  Debian  packages  has  been
       added.

   Version 1.18	(2009-Nov-29)
       * Numerous build	glitches and warnings have been	fixed.

       *  There	 is  a	new  tardy -exclude option that	may be used to exclude
       (remove)	files from the archive.

   Version 1.17	(2008-Jun-23)
       * A build problem with GCC 4.3 has been fixed [Gentoo Bug 226861].

   Version 1.16	(2008-Apr-29)
       * The tabs in the Makefile.in file have been fixed.

   Version 1.15	(2008-Apr-14)
       * The license has been updated to GNU GPL version 3.

   Version 1.12	(2004-Aug-17)
       * Tardy has a new home page, http://tardy.sourceforge.net/

       * The tardy --remove-prefix  option  has	 been  extended	 to  accept  a
       numeric argument, giving	the count of directories to be removed.

       *  A  bug has been fixed	in the tardy --reomve-prefix option.  If there
       is a directory named exactly for	the prefix being removed,  it  is  now
       renamed to "." rather than being	left unaltered.

       *  The  tar  output has been altered to be consistent with GNU Tar 1.14
       and later.  As of GNU Tar 1.14, it warns	if the block size on input  is
       not what	it expects.  Tardy now uses the	same default block size	as GNU
       Tar when	writing	tarballs, which	silences the GNU Tar warning.

   Version 1.11	(2002-Oct-20)
       * A bug has been	fixed with  the	 processing  of	 very  long  directory
       names.

   Version 1.10	(2002-Oct-16)
       * Some documentation errors have	been corrected.

       * Some build problems have been fixed.

   Version 1.9 (27-Aug-2001)
       * A number fo build problems have been fixed.

       * Support has been added	for long names.

   Version 1.8 (24-Oct-2001)
       *  The  generated Makefile.in file was missing some dependencies.  This
       has been	fixed.

   Version 1.7 (23-Oct-2001)
       * A number of files were	missing	from the  tarball.   These  have  been
       added.

   Version 1.6 (23-Oct-2001)
       *  Build	 and  test problems caused by the recent RH7 release have been
       fixed.

   Version 1.5 (13-Sep-2000)
       * Tardy has been	entirely re-written in C++.

       * Tardy now understands cpio formats in addition	to tar formats.

       * Tardy now comes with an RPM package spec.

   Version 1.4 (1998-Jan-25)
       Never had a public release.

   Version 1.3
       Never had a public release.

   Version 1.2
       * This version of tardy now uses	a  GNU	autoconf  generated  configure
       script to automatically configure the tardy program.



								 readme(tardy)
