Re: Removing Mac OS X resource forks from distribution tarballs

[Dave Hart]

Hi Ralf,
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 05:28 UTC, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hello Dave,
>
> * Dave Hart wrote on Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 11:06:02PM CEST:
>> Right, one approach would be to run a dist-hook which strips all
>> resource forks from distdir files.
>>
>> An equally effective approach which Automake could potentially handle
>> generally on Darwin would be to instruct tar to ignore resource forks
>> when creating the tar file.
>
> Please show how that would work.

I don't use Macs, but web searching suggests an answer.  Apparently,
there is no command-line switch to disable generation of ._
psuedofiles in tarballs, but there is an undocumented environment
variable that so modifies tar behavior,
COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true. For reasons unknown outside the
bowels of One Infinite Loop, this was renamed to the
far-less-appropriate COPYFILE_DISABLE as of the Leopard release of Mac
OS X.  [1]

When the build triplet matches *-apple-darwin*, Automake could include
in the distdir target code to set both of the undocumented environment
variables to true.  That presumes no Automake clients find the
extended attributes and resource forks in tarballs valuable.

Cheers,
Dave Hart

[1] http://norman.walsh.name/2008/02/22/tar