Re: [Bug-tar] GNU tar 1.22 creating USTAR not readable by other TAR implementations

[Kent Boortz]

Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden> writes:
>> In some cases just the error message is a bit misleading.
>
> What message are you referring to?

Sorry, it was mostly the Solaris one that says "filename is greater
than 100" for just about anything ;)

The GNU TAR error messages are fine. Sure "max 256" is not 100%
accurate, but I would not know what message should work better,
"maybe"

  path name exceeds the USTAR format limitations; not dumped

The "cannot be split" means nothing to the normal user, but I can't
find a better message there either, unless repeating the same message
as above about USTAR format limitations. But too general error
messages makes debugging harder.

But not important, sorry for mentioning it.

>> The third line (1) triggers the bug again, making second header to
>> have nothing in the "name" field.
>
> Yes, indeed.  Thanks for reporting.
>
>> Worse, in the test (1) the third record is corrupt, "name" is
>> "cccc....bbbb...." with no "/", i.e. file name is wrong.
>
> Can't reproduce this. In this case I get 100 'c' characters in the
> name field and the correct prefix.  Can you send me the tar archive
> you got in this step?

Sorry, sloppy weekend coding from my side. The debug snippet I wrote
to debug this didn't take into account that in some situations, no \n
is added by strncpy(). So the "Worse..." part above is not correct.

Ah, I tried without your patch now an can't reproduce the problem if
the directory is 100-154 characters and the file 100, works fine. So
guess the patch needs some more work ;)

Thank you Sergey and thank you Tim for taking the time to answers to
my questions!

kent

-- 
Kent Boortz, Senior Production Engineer
Sun Microsystems Inc., the MySQL team
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