On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 04:06:40PM +0200, Hans Kinwel wrote:
> Despite all my searching, I couldn't find that message on the list again.
> However, I found something better: the official word from the dump
> authors.
> 
> Here it is.  http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html

Excellent, hadn't read this before.  They hit most all the important
points.  They seem to miss:

1)  ACLs.  There are things you can do with ACLs that are painful to
    accomplish without them, and GNU tar doesn't support them, period.

2)  Not *all* the world is a Linux box.  Yet.  :-)

    The Solaris kernel has a unified VM/VFS interface (actually, I guess
    most/all SYSVR4 kernels do, as well as FreeBSD, and perhaps other
    BSD's, not knowledgable there), making it possible in theory and
    in practice (mostly) for ufsdump to be aware of file system buffer
    activity.

As an aside on the speed issue... on estimate phase, 'ufsdump S' kicks
GNU tar's butt.  It's not obvious to me exactly *why*; GNU tar is smart
enough to know it's output file is /dev/null and not bother reading
data blocks, but on my particular big file systems with lots of files,
three estimate passes take literally hours longer with GNU tar compared
to ufsdump.

-- 
Jay Lessert                               jay_lessert AT accelerant DOT net
Accelerant Networks Inc.                       (voice)1.503.439.3461
Beaverton OR, USA                                (fax)1.503.466.9472