I would suggest moving zip and unzip to opt.

That also applies to GNU tar. (my suggestion in this case would be to rename 'tar' into 'gtar', and to symlink the default tar implementation to 'tar' — bsdtar in our case)

That is a very good idea +1.

I've no strong opinion moving zip/unzip to opt, but we have to find a maintainer for them, because both should stay in opt.

I'm against the suggested changes with regard to tar. If a user calls 'tar' he could expect that he runs the original 'tar' and not what the CRUX maintainer thought is a nice replacement for it.

bsdtar is fully compatible with “the original tar”. And it does have a lot more features. Besides, tar is not GNU tar, and I don’t see why GNU tar should be installed instead of another implementation of the same software (because it’s GNU and everyone does that without knowing why?).

Sorry if I’m a bit offensive here, but I really dislike when people use GNU tools thinking they are a standard. :|

No worries, but I simply mean the tar build by our tar port, nothing more.

Well, we could have a tar port building libarchive. I fail to see the point. The port is currently named “tar” only because gtar is distributed under the name “tar”, not because it is the original tar or whatever.

Any other package providing a tar implementation with the same standard UI and the support of the same archives format would do the job.

Which point? You are suggesting a change and I have a different opinion on that, so what's the problem?

The problem, for me, is the package “tar” not being called “gtar”, be it in core or not, and you referring to “tar” without me knowing if you are thinking about “tar” or about “gtar”. Am I making any sense?

Besides, I fail to understand why you don’t see bsdtar as a valid tar implementation instead of a simple “replacement” for tar.

gnu tar is the standard "tar" for most gnu/linux distributions and has been so since.. forever? Are there any specific reasons to replace gnu-tar with bsdtar?

bsdtar supports more archive formats?¹?, it is based on libarchive which the pkgutils use anyway, and a lot of work has been done recently to make it faster than gtar. Essentially, gtar is useless since we already have bsdtar in core, and in my opinion, linking tar to bsdtar and rename the current “tar” port into “gtar” would allow removing that package from core. Just as zip.

I’d like to mention that some Linux distributions don’t use gtar but busybox tar, star or bsdtar, so it is not an absolute rule.

?¹? This includes tar.lz, rpm, cpio and a few others gtar does not support at all. The cpio support also means we could remove cpio (gcpio) in the same fashion and for the same reasons.