Re: svn commit: r8966 - trunk

On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 10:43:23PM +0100, Jostein Chr. Andersen wrote:
> Was the 100 char filename limit the only reason for this patch? If so, then
> I think that this limit be old news. Newer GNU tars (> 1.11.8)are not
> supposed to have this limit:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/tar_117.html

Not exactly correct. GNU tar doesn't have this limit. It will produce
tar files that have filenames longer than 100 characters. The problem
is it does this in a completely non-standard way that only GNU tar (or
other apps that are supporting their non-standard extension) supports.

The POSIX standard at one point in time was limited to 100 characters.
It was changed to support up to 256 chars. However GNU tar doesn't
support generating this extension and continues to generate files using
its own extension.

This means platforms that are using a POSIX compliant tar will not be
able to extract a tar file generated by GNU tar with filenames longer
than 100 chars. There is no way to make GNU tar generate tar files
without this extension when you have such long names. Solaris is an
example of one of these platforms. Our 1.0.0 tarballs will not extract
using the included tar program.

However, GNU tar does support expanding files that are POSIX compliant
with the new extension.

So our options are:

1) Don't use GNU tar.

2) Tell people on these problems that they need to get GNU tar to expand
our tar files.

Considering that we've gone to great efforts to be portable it seems
silly to ignore the problem. Especially when cpio can generate the
files that are compliant with the current POSIX standard.

Platforms that aren't compatble with the current POSIX standard will not
be able to extract the file no matter what we do. They'll have to get a
different tar file. The only solution for these platforms is to get
filenames under 100 chars. However, I don't think there are very many
of these platforms.

> Anyway, I have two suggestions where _one_ of them should be picked up
> IMHO:
> 1. If this patch, for any reason, should be approved (well it is committed,
> so it is), then it should be merged to the 1.0.x branch as well. I'll be
> happy to vote for it in the STATUS file(even if I like suggestion 2 below
> better).

I'm going to add it to the STATUS file.

> 2. Revert it. KISS! ;-)

The solution isn't all that more complex. Removes dependencies on GNU
specific extensions to standard commands (the compression options to
tar). And makes our tarballs more portable.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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