Re: [Bug-tar] Possible Bug?

[Helmut Waitzmann]

"enric" <address@hidden> writes:

>Probably you're right and tar tries to remove the directory instead of
>renaming it. 
> 
>Anyway, before posting I already tried with "--recursive-unlink" option
>but neither worked. The problem was the same since tar could not unlink
>directories that are not empty.

As far as I understand the manual, that would be a discrepancy between
the manual and the actual behavior of tar.

>It seems to me very natural to rename directories keeping their content
>unaltered (when reorganizing folders, for instance) 

indeed.

>and I would expect tar's incremental backups to manage this use case
>properly so I guess I'm missing something obvious here.

I don't know whether gnu tar's incremental archive format has the ability
to store renaming operations, but I guess, it does not.

It is impossible by merely looking at a directory to tell whether is has
been renamed, or has been created since the last incremental backup, so
there is no easy way for gnu tar to tell whether a directory has to be
stored in the incremental backup or whether just a renaming instruction
to be stored in the incremental backup (if that is possible at all) would
suffice.

Therefore I don't expect gnu tar to handle this use case.

Regards,

Helmut
-- 
Wer mir E-Mail schreiben will, stelle   |   When writing me e-mail, please
bitte vor meine E-Mail-Adresse meinen   |   precede my e-mail address with
Vor- und Nachnamen, etwa so:            |   my full name, like
Helmut Waitzmann <address@hidden>, (Helmut Waitzmann) address@hidden