Re: tar: minor POSIX incompliance

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Joey Hess <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 14:57:20 -0500
> 
> According to the test suite documentation, POSIX 10.1.1-12(A) says
> that Fields mode, uid, gid, size, mtime, chksum, devmajor and
> devminor are leading zero-filled octal numbers in ASCII and are
> terminated by one or more space or null characters.

OK, I'll change the behavior of GNU "tar" in a future release.

However, this change is irrelevant to the question of whether GNU tar
conforms to POSIX, as POSIX does not specify the behavior of the "tar"
command.  It is incorrect for a test suite to check for POSIX
conformance by running the "tar" command.  A POSIX test suite should
invoke the "pax" command instead.

Also, I should mention that GNU tar does not generate POSIX-format
ustar archives, nor does it claim to.  Volunteers to fix this
deficiency would be welcome, but that's a different topic.  It is a
quality-of-implementation issue, and is not strictly a
POSIX-conformance issue.


> the LSB people may decide to waive the test, not requiring it for a
> distribution to claim LSB compliance. On the other hand, they may not; see
> http://lists.debian.org/lsb-test/2001/lsb-test-200105/msg00003.html

I'll CC: this message to lsb-test so that they know of the bug in the
test suite that is being used here.