Re: VMS file attribute issue with gnutar / file utilities.

[Bruno Haible]

[This is off-topic for this list, but anyway.]
John E. Malmberg wrote:
> The best hack that I can come up with is to mangle the name of the file 
> to contain that information, and demangle it on the unpack.
> 
> This way if the tarball is unpacked on a non-VMS system and re-packed, 
> the file attribute information will not be lost.

Another option is to do it the way the Apple MacOS "resource forks" are
stored in .zip files. This is done as follows: If a file foo/bar.suf
has a "resource fork" (usually up to 512 bytes of binary data), then the
zip contains two files

  foo/bar.suf
  __APPLE_RESOURCES__/foo/bar.suf

This way, if the tarball is unpacked on a non-MacOS system and re-packed,
the added information will not be lost. And additionally, this added
information does not hurt: it is in a separate directory that can easily
be removed.

Bruno