Re: Testing pax on platforms was Re: Using pax instead of cpio in dist.sh

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 12:00:43AM +0200, Tobias Ringstrom wrote:
> What I was trying to say was that we don't need to test if the USTAR
> format works. We did that when we started to use cpio instead of GNU
> tar to create the tarballs. We will just use another tool to create the
> same thing -- hopefully a tool with no bugs.

*cough* I think you're a little too confident here... I tried pax
tonight:

$ gzip -dc subversion-1.0.1.tar.gz | tar xvf -
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

file doesn't even think it is a tar file:
$ file subversion-1.0.1.tar
subversion-1.0.1.tar: data

I'll try it on a different machine later. I tried this on amd64 and
it's possible pax doesn't work righ ton this platform for whatever
reason (i.e. a bug).

> The only reason to test pax would be to test for bugs in the one that
> will be used to produce the official tarball. If five different pax
> implementations and versions will be used, they should either all be
> tested, or none of them needs to be tested. Pax produces USTAR files.
> That is the purpose of pax. There is no reason to test the pax in RHL9
> if you will use OS X to produce the tarballs. That was all I meant.
> That said, I think we can trust pax to be correct, and we don't need to
> test it. I'm not against testing it, of course. I just wanted to
> explain why I though that it was unneccessary to test it.

Given that we've now tried 3 different tar implementations looking for
one that produces portable and correct tar archives and so far we
haven't found one... I'm not quite as confident of this as you are.

> The decision (or even discussion) that we shouldn't have a dedicated RM
> did not happen publicly, and the outcome is not publicly available
> except in the form of little hints, so who can be blamed for missing
> that point?

Well I don't think any decision has been made. Justin and I both have
that as a goal. If it can be attained remains to be seen.

-- 
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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