[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Tla short-path 1.3 possible bug

[John A Meinel]

Tancred Lindholm wrote:
>
> Mr. Meinel,
>
> I am Tancred Lindholm, researcher at the Helsinki Institute for
> Information Technology (www.hiit.fi). I am writing to you regarding the
> implementation of arch available at
> http://ct.radiology.uiowa.edu/~jfmeinel/tla-short-path. I hope I have
> reached the right person.

I'm glad you find what I wrote interesting. I'm curious how you found
that particular email, but you did indeed get the right person. (I
suppose there aren't many jfmeinel's in the world, though I just changed
my name to jameinel after getting married :)

>
> It appears there is a problem with paths of exactly 100 chars in tar
> archives generated by tla-short-path for cygwin. As I understand it,
> tla-short-path includes code that filters path names in tar files, and
> it appears that the tar archive gets broken at this point. The error
> shows up as erroneous concatenation of the string "000644" to the end of
> file names. It appears that the error only occurs with the latest tar
> for cygwin (1.15.2).

Hmmm. Well there are a couple of issues here. First, I can try and check
the code to make sure it is filtering properly for items of length 100.
In the tar header there is exactly 100 characters available for the
filename, which doesn't require null termination. (at least from what I
read of the spec).

Is the problem that the tarballs in your archive are broken, or that
when you check them out, they are created with the wrong name. (I'm
trying to determine if my understanding of the spec is wrong, or if it
is just a simple filtering bug).

In general, I have stopped supporting tla-short-path, in favor of using
bazaar, and "baz-dos" (or baz-pcomp), available in binary form from:
http://bazaar.canonical.com/Downloads
And in source form from:
http://arch.arbash-meinel.com/address@hidden/

Here are the steps to get the source from baz (substituting tla for baz
should work just fine)

baz register-archive
http://arch.arbash-meinel.com/address@hidden/
baz get address@hidden/dists--baz-pcomp baz-pcomp
cd baz-pcomp
baz build-config bazaar-devo-.cfg

There will be a README file in the source directory telling you how to
build everything else (the only problematic one is libgpgme, everything
else just needs special configure options.)

Now, the one thing to mention is that the working directories (and
revision libraries) are not compatible between baz-pcomp and
tla-short-path, this is because tla-short-path actually changes path
names, while baz-pcomp just internally uses the dos8.3 version of the name.

However, these programs should both be compatible at the archive level,
so you just have to remove your working directory (and revlib) and
re-get your projects.


>
> If you are interested, I am able to provide sample (broken) tar files. I
> could also possibly try to fix the bug myself: I have tla getted the
> source, but I have been unable to generate working Makefiles using
> autoconf et co (missing dirs.mk and library.mk; I suspect the problem is
> due to my ignorance on how these tools are used).

So if you untar the files by hand, you still have the problem? Or is it
just if tla-short-path untars them?

Is it critical for you to continue using tla, or can you upgrade to baz?

>
> best regards,
>
> Tancred Lindholm
>

I'm adding the mailinglist, so that we will have an archive of this
problem. If you really need it, you might be able to convince me to work
on it (I don't like leaving buggy code around). But I did switch
development work because I found the tla codebase to be hard to work in.
Actually, I've really switched to bazaar 2.0, aka bazaar-ng, aka bzr.
But I'm still maintaining the baz-pcomp port of the bazaar 1.5 codebase.
(It's also a much less invasive change, so less likely to fail).

John
=:->

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature