Re: Guix binary tarball

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> Andreas Enge <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> > Could these directories be left out of the tarball and only their
>>> > contents be kept in?
>>> No.  Maybe we can fix it by using two tar invocations with different
>>> --owner.
>>
>> Well, you never know what permissions the directories have on the target
>> machine, and these are also changed. Maybe one needs to untar with particular
>> options.
>
> I looked in the GNU tar manual, and found this:
>
> `--no-overwrite-dir'
>      Preserve metadata of existing directories when extracting files
>      from an archive.  *Note Overwrite Old Files::.

I experimentally determined that --no-overwrite-dir has no effect but
that --skip-old-files does what we need: ownership and permissions on
/var and /root are preserved, and files are extracted correctly in those
directories.  Hence 8c3a5d7.

Thanks,
Ludo’.