Re: [Bug-tar] Tar 1.27 has become non-deterministic

[Joerg Schilling]

Nathan Stratton Treadway <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 15:37:48 -0500, Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote:
> > (But I don't know if that level of cross-version consistency is
> > important enough to bother with.)
>
> I just ran across a discussion in the Debian bug tracking system where
> the change in output between 1.26 and 1.27 was causing problems:
>
>   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=726963
>      "cannot reproduce several *.tar.xz files (possibly tar issue?)"

What do you mean with "the output"? The archive format, or the listing output?

BTW: star archives all three times since 1985 (this is longer than gtar exists) 
and archiving more then mtime will of course always create "different" archives.
Well since 1992, star allows to select the archive format and thus could allow 
you to select a less powerful format that only archives the mtime....

I recommend to be careful when creating archives that are going to be 
distributed. I e.g. use this:

star -Hustar -cPM -find star-1.5.3 ! -type l -chown root -chgrp bin > 
star-1.5.3.tar

when I create a star source tarball.

As you see, I do not let normal IDs appear in the archive and I use the 
historical POSIX.1-1988 archive format.

With previous gtar versions, similar precautions would not always help. I know 
that gtar does not use libfind, but gtar also had the problem, that it did not 
grant to write archives only in the selected archive format. This e.g. caused 
some projects (such as mysql) to create source archives that could not be 
extracted by other tar implementations but gtar...because there have been 
unexpected vendor specific enhancements.



Jörg

-- 
 EMail:address@hidden (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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