an alternative suggestion for "tar" and user/group names

[Robert P. J. Day]

  it occurs to me that there's an alternative for tar in terms of this
whole UID/GID/names thing.  as it stands, tar currently displays the
numeric UID and GID from the tar header info, and natanael's patch
would change that bahaviour to display the user and group names
instead.  but that means that choice has to be made at configuration
time and is undoable at run time -- you're stuck with it.

  natanael, why not flip that around?  make tar display the user and
group names *by default*, and add the code and a config menu entry to
allow the user to display the UID and GID instead via a run-time
option, just as GNU tar does with "--numeric-owner"?  (in short, you
really are "enabling support" to display the numeric IDs if you so
choose.)

  that way, the user has a choice *at run time* as to whether to see
the names or the numeric IDs.  it's more informative and it's GNU
compatible.  thoughts?

rday

p.s.  this raises one issue that i was thinking about earlier.  with
GNU tar, that "numeric ID" option is available *only* via a long
option.  what do you do with something like that if someone chooses
not to support long options with "tar"?  do you just make up a short
option for it?  or what?