[19607] in Athena Bugs
Re: Important: panel's menu tar file is corrupt
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Mon Aug 13 10:07:22 2001
Message-Id: <200108131407.KAA26227@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: Abby Fox <ajfox@MIT.EDU>
cc: ghudson@MIT.EDU, mitchb@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 13 Aug 2001 09:06:39 EDT."
<200108131306.JAA15252@whirlwind.mit.edu>
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Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 10:07:20 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
I've done a bit more investigating. Reading the former dejanews reveals that
we're in very good company, and it's common to create a tarball on a Linux
box, then have Solaris fail to extract it with a directory checksum error.
It's claimed that Solaris's tar is broken and the recommended solution is to
use GNU tar. The most commonly cited issue has to do with filename lengths.
This is from the Solaris 8 tar man page:
When a file is archived, and the E flag (see Function
Modifiers) is not specified, the filename cannot
exceed 256 characters. In addition, it must be possi-
ble to split the name between parent directory names
so that the prefix is no longer than 155 characters
and the name is no longer than 100 characters. If E is
specified, a name of up to PATH_MAX characters may be
specified.
I looked through the corrupted tarball on Linux and didn't notice any names that were too long according to these rules, though. Some of the postings I read on dejanews mentioned that there were other subtle brokennesses with Solaris tar, but didn't elaborate (I haven't read them all yet). So, I'm not exactly sure what the bug we're tickling is, but I now suspect it's on the Solaris side, not the Linux side.
Mitch
