tar/README-alpha

This is GNU tar.

This is a *pre-release* version, and not ready for production use yet.
Please send comments and problem reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.

If you have taken the sources from CVS you will need the following
packages (or later) to build GNU tar.  We don't make any extra effort
to accommodate older versions of these packages.  If we discover that
newer versions are needed to bootstrap, we'll update the version
numbers in this list.

autoconf 2.59
automake 1.8
bison 1.875
gettext 0.12.1
m4 1.4
wget 1.7

For GNU m4 1.4, we recommend also installing the `translit' patch; see
Debian bug 211477 <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=211477>.
This patch is bundled into Debian m4 1.4-17 or later.

Before building the package, run "bootstrap".  It obtains various
additional files from the CVS repository and the Translation Project
site and prepares the source directory for building.

When run without arguments, bootstrap will try to obtain gnulib files
from CVS repository on savannah using anonymous SSH access. Then, it
will fetch the po files from tar page at Translation Project, and,
finally, it will start autoconfiguration process. Simply running
it without arguments should do in most cases. Several options
allow to control the behavior of bootstrap:


 --gnulib-srcdir=DIRNAME      Specify the local directory where gnulib
                              sources reside. Use this if you already
                              have gnulib sources on your machine, and
                              do not want to waste your bandwidth dowloading
                              them again.
 --cvs-auth=METHOD            Set the CVS access method used for downloading
                              gnulib files. METHOD is one of the keywords
                              accepted by cvs -d option (see info cvs
                              repository).
 --cvs-user=USERNAME          Set the CVS username to be used when accessing
                              the gnulib repository.
 --no-po                      Do not download po files.

Notice also that when using CVS authentication method "ext", bootstrap
will set the variable CVS_RSH to "ssh", unless it is already set to
some other value.



Copyright (C) 2001, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This file is part of GNU tar.

GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.

GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY 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 tar; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to
the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.