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

[Kent Boortz]

Hi again, hope I'm not boring you ;)

In don't claim that GNU tar is worse than other TAR implementations
how to handle USTAR, but the state of testing USTAR compatibility
between TAR implementations is a bit sad.

I wrote a quick Perl snippet to run my tests again, now also including
"CMake" built in TAR. I also ran "tar -tf" for each package produced
(if return code was 0) and grepped for the original path in the
output. A bit simplistic test, I know, but the randomness in the
result is a bit shocking, at least to me.

For CMake TAR I note that they happily return the code 0 even if
things go wrong. Also a bit "funny" is that they sometimes cut the
path by few characters (even when not needed) and store the file
anyway. As the path is split between the "prefix" and "name" fields,
both parts might be cut by a few characters.

Result and test script is attached,

kent

TARERR.gz
Description: Binary data

ustartest
Description: Binary data

-- 
Kent Boortz, Senior Production Engineer
Sun Microsystems Inc., the MySQL team
Office: +46 863 11 363
Mobile: +46 70 279 11 71