Re: [Bug-tar] Incompatible behavior between 1.23 and 1.27?

[Florian Fainelli]

2016-04-27 13:20 GMT-07:00 Florian Fainelli <address@hidden>:
> Hi all,
>
> (please CC me as I am not subscribed)
>
> I have the following tar archive being constructed like this:
>
> tar -C .. -cf ../rootfs-$(DOTVERSION).tar rootfs
> tar -C .. -rf ../rootfs-$(DOTVERSION).tar -h rootfs/misc/release_builds
>
> This done so as to de-reference just that file, there are other symbolic
> links under rootfs/ that I do not want to de-reference, just this
> particular one.
>
> Now, while extracting this tar archive on two different systems I
> noticed different behaviors:
>
> - tar 1.23 extracts this just fine and rootfs/misc/release_builds
> ends-up being a regular file
>
> - tar 1.27 on the other extracts the file, but still has
> rootfs/misc/release_builds as a symbolic link

So it started to break as early as 1.24 actually, I could not quite
run a successful bisection yet because the gnulib we get from
./bootstrap is newer than what tar is expected to be using (if you
know which gnulib version tar 1.23 and tar 1.24 I could pinpoint
exaclty when it started to break).

Also tried to create two tar files and then concatenate them, but it
produced the same results with the same versions, which is reinsuring
in some ways. I would really be curious to see if there is an easy way
to get the 1.23 behavior back with newer versions of tar. FWIW,
attached is the test case that I used.
-- 
Florian

test.tar.bz2
Description: BZip2 compressed data