Terry Hancock wrote:
On Monday 22 September 2003 03:31 pm, Jamie Heilman wrote:
Waiting for all the versions of tar in the world to suddenly agree on how to handle path names containing over 100 characters isn't a terribly effective approach. What would be really swift, is if Zope Corp just restructured their code so there were no longer any paths that exceeded said limit.
Well, since Gnu Tar is available to everyone, I think it *is* a worldwide open standard on how to handle long pathnames in tar files. Other tar programs apparently do not handle them at all. So I think there's a pretty clear cut case here that those other tar programs are simply broken.
I didn't say anything about standards, but since you bring it up http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_node/tar_117.html#SEC112
And anyway, how many tar programs are you aware of? The broken tar I know of is specifically the System 5 derived tar that comes with Solaris -- are there others?
Several, but its irrelevant, the problem is either worth fixing or it isn't, and the only way to fix it to re-arrange the source. I mean if you're going to tell people to download a new tar you might as well tell them to grab cvs and just check the source out directly avoiding the whole mess. There is a note about tar pecularites in the FAQ document inside the tarball... which is fine I guess, but its evidently not enough. I think the real problem is that the symptoms of the problem tend vary, sometimes the breakage doesn't manifest as a checksum error, or it scrolls off the console too fast to see or something, so people invariably end up asking the list. Anyway, I sort of doubt the source will change, but it would avoid the problem, and it would make it easier on the newbies. Somebody told me this community was into that. -- Jamie Heilman http://audible.transient.net/~jamie/ "You came all this way, without saying squat, and now you're trying to tell me a '56 Chevy can beat a '47 Buick in a dead quarter mile? I liked you better when you weren't saying squat kid." -Buddy