Re: [Bug-tar] Tar 1.27 has become non-deterministic

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 20:33:32 +0200, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> > (For what it's worth, with [just] this patch, David's scripts will still
> > detect "phantom" changes in the archives when he first moves from 1.26
> > to 1.27, due to the change in the umask field values for these LongLink
> > entries.)
> 
> Yes, I know.  But that cannot be helped: start_private_header is used
> in other places where safe umask is important (perhaps in this case
> too).

(Note: I wrote "umask field" earlier, but actually the field in question
is called "mode".)

Well, in v1.26 the write_gnu_long_link() function had the line
  FILL (header->header.mode, '0');
after the start_private_header() call, so I gather the mode field on
these LongLink entries is not used.  

Thus, presumably if it seemed worth keeping cross-version consistency.
you could still explicitly set the field back to "0000000" inside of
write_gnu_long_link() (without changing start_private_header).

(But I don't know if that level of cross-version consistency is
important enough to bother with.)

                                                Nathan
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Stratton Treadway  -  address@hidden  -  Mid-Atlantic region
Ray Ontko & Co.  -  Software consulting services  -   http://www.ontko.com/
 GPG Key: http://www.ontko.com/~nathanst/gpg_key.txt   ID: 1023D/ECFB6239
 Key fingerprint = 6AD8 485E 20B9 5C71 231C  0C32 15F3 ADCD ECFB 6239