[Discuss-gnuradio] An obscure cmake bug

[Paul Boven]

Hi everyone,

When building UHD and GNU Radio, I usually opt to use 'make package', to 
then install the resulting debian package on my machine. For me, this 
has the advantage that all the installed filed are registered with the 
package manager, and it is easy to cleanly remove my install again so I 
don't end up with conflicting GR installs.

However, for GNU Radio, 'make package' already for a long time results 
in a .deb that cannot be installed, apt chokes on it with the message 
that the tar file is corrupt. When disassembling the package by hand, 
tar has no issues reading the tar file. It turns out however that the 
tar command within dpkg doesn't implement various tar extensions, and 
one (just one) filename in the resulting tar file is long enough that it 
requires a tar extension block to encode it. Cmake by default used the 
'paxr' format for this.

Because of this, I filed a bug with the maintainers of cmake, who 
quickly addressed the issue.

https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/issues/18620#note_486393

Until this fix actually makes it into cmake installs at end users, a 
workaround would be to add a flag to cmake when setting up GNU Radio: 
-DCPACK_DEBIAN_ARCHIVE_TYPE=gnutar

Regards, Paul Boven.