[Duplicity-talk] Adding resource fork awareness to tarfile.py

[Apple Consultants Network]

Dear List,

I am new to the list so hello to all.  I just discovered duplicity  
yesterday and have it running on OS X 10.4.7.  So far I've only done  
file:// archives and everything appears great with the exception of  
the Apple user's bane... resource forks.  Originally I thought I  
would dig out my copy of hfstar (before I realized that Apple is  
shipping an extended attribute aware tar in 10.4.x) and symlink tar  
to hfstar to capture forked files properly.  This was before I dug in  
and discovered that it appears that tarfile.py is defining the  
behavior of tar.  Admittedly, I am below a newbie to python  
(translated - I have no idea what I am looking at).  So, therein is  
my problem.

Apple ships a tarfile.py file in /System/Library/Frameworks/ 
Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/ which appears to be  
newer (?) than the tarfile that shipped with Duplicity.  It also has  
some additional Mac specific blocks on code.  So naturally, I  
replaced the duplicity tarfile.py with the one from Apple, built, and  
installed.  However, when I run duplicity, it throws errors and exits  
out.  Obviously the tarfile.py files are not interchangeable.   For  
what it is worth, here is the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./duplicity", line 373, in ?
    if __name__ == "__main__": main()
  File "./duplicity", line 367, in main
    else: incremental_backup(sig_chain)
  File "./duplicity", line 169, in incremental_backup
    sig_chain.get_fileobjs(), new_sig_outfp)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/ 
python2.3/site-packages/duplicity/diffdir.py", line 251, in  
DirDelta_WriteSig
    return DeltaTarBlockIter(delta_iter)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/ 
python2.3/site-packages/duplicity/diffdir.py", line 377, in __init__
    self.tf = tarfile.TarFromIterator(None)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'TarFromIterator'

Does anyone have suggestions of how I might be able to support  
resource forks from an HFS volume when using duplicity?  My hope was  
that it simply called tar from the file system to create the  
archives.  And since Apple has been so kind as to support forked  
files with common unix tools, I really thought I had an easy solution  
here.

Thanks for your time and suggestions.

Reid