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Re: [Bug-tar] dist tarball contains hardlinks


From: Dimitrios Apostolou
Subject: Re: [Bug-tar] dist tarball contains hardlinks
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 12:12:09 +0100 (CET)
User-agent: Alpine 2.10 (DEB 1266 2009-07-14)

On Fri, 23 Jan 2015, Pavel Raiskup wrote:

On Friday 23 of January 2015 15:45:57 Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
Thank you Joerg. If so then it is an issue that must be fixed in
automake, which is the reason I cross-posted to both projects, because I
am not sure which one should be changed!

What solution you exactly propose?  Note that 'h' tar option is used for

Maybe adding --hard-dereference? That's how I worked around the issue at least.

dist from Y1996 commit [1] and its removal is unlikely.  It is quite
portable and it, as the "default", works for many packages.

It has been there since 1996, so the legacy behaviour of tar has been battle tested. However the new behaviour (hard links in place of symlinks) is probably only tested for a couple of years, and I've seen complaints online.

What is not clear to me also is your motivation to change GNU tar to
behave differently, or to change something so old in automake.  IMO, the

Using "tar-ustar" format for distribution you are supposed to raise some of the limits of the "v7" tar format but retain portability. Indeed, the length limit for regular files used to be 256 characters [2], and since all symlinks were stored as files that was universal. Now that symlinks are stored as hard links, the limit is 100 characters for those, thus I've hit this problem.

[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/tar_68.html

reason why you hit this issue is not the "hardlinking" change itself, but
rather just small mistake of the maintainer who did not read STDERR tar's
warnings while doing 'make dist'.  We could make those warnings more
obvious..  is that what you want?

I see this as a separate issue, and my opinion is that automake should fail "make dist" when tar returns an error. I've filed a separate bug report for that [3].

[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2015-01/msg00019.html


Dimitris


[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/commit/?id=7930983ab1c620

Pavel





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