[Bug-tar] Bug regarding --exclude in 1.29

[Christian Ehrhardt]

Hi,

since the src and build system didn't let me understand immediately where the --exclude is handled so I could debug it - I though it would be worth to discuss shortly if any of the effects I see would be known or intended.

I found and reported the issue in Ubuntu, but no one but me cares so far:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/tar/+bug/1588690

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=826195

TL;DR:

1.28 working

1.29 Failing

So I tried upstream tar from https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/

./configure

make -j4

rm -rf dir; mkdir -p dir/subdir; touch dir/subdir/file; ./src/tar -c -f /tmp/test.tar -C dir subdir --exclude subdir/file; ./src/tar -tf /tmp/test.tar subdir/file

And I found this even failing upstream since 1.29

Nothing in upstream changelog about it.

Existing tests don't cover it.

Both versions fail the same amount of tests.

So is that any sort of known issue - or if not would you agree it is a regression that we should work on?

Christian Ehrhardt

Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server

Canonical Ltd