Re: [Bug-tar] ACL support in git version of GNU tar

[Joerg Schilling]

Markus Steinborn <address@hidden> wrote:

> >> (1) tar archive creation with "--numeric-owner" option:
> >>
> >> In this case, users are expectiing that the archive does not contain any
> >> symbolic owner name, so it can be extracted to an emoty hard disc on a
> >> system bootet e. g. by a rescue cd from Redhat. Current sitation is that
> >> ACLs still include the symbolic owner and not the numeric owner.
> [...}
> >> I'd like to note that this improvement is essential to me.
> > Why?
> >
> > Star introduced the -numeric option in 1993 to work in create list and 
> > extract
> > mode. The ACL Support introduced in 2001 was created to behave in a similar 
> > way.
> >
> > If gtar does the same, the best way would be to use -numeric in extract 
> > mode.
> >
> Assume you've created an archive with that option. You want to restore 
> it to a new hard disc drive. All you have available are redhat rescue 
> cd's (from today, not from future). Their tar will do it correctly iff 
> the archives are created with the owner-field being numeric.
>
> So users could benefit from that proposed change. And it costs so less.

With "normal" user credentials in tar, this works, as you may just omit the 
user/group name fields in the tar header.

With ACL fields, you cannot do that as star uses a ACL description that was 
derived from an outdated stanndard proposal. 

So if you like to get the behavior you expect with ACLs, you would need to use
-numeric during an extract operation. As long as just the name data-base on the 
system used to extract is missing, star always does what you expect.




Jörg

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