Re: cg-export incompatible with older versions of GNU tar

Wolfgang Denk wrote:

In message [ref] you wrote:

quoted

quoted

-> tar jxf foo.tar.bz2 
tar: pax_global_header: Unknown file type 'g', extracted as normal file
...

quoted

It is unclear if the tar actually extracts the archive or not, though.
Does it just complain with those warnings, or are they fatal errors?

In this case extraction went fine, except for the warning message.

And you get an extra file, pax_global_header, containing the commit ID
of the archive's contents.

I had other error reports from customers befroe, where unpacking  the
tarballs failed - instead of the origianl source tree just a bunch of
*.data  and  *.paxheader  were created; error messages in these cases
looked like this:

tar: pax_global_header: Unknown file type 'g', extracted as normal file
tar: ea1efd7f213469bcde030e00ac9f89ed16256869.paxheader: Unknown file type 'x', extracted as normal file

[snip]

This happens when you have pathes inside the tar file that are longer
than 100 characters.  Is this taken from a real-world project or is it
just some test?

All your files with pathes longer than 100 chars will be extracted as
<SHA1>.data, with an accompanying <SHA1>.paxheader file.  The latter
contains the real filename.  You could then repair the mess by renaming
them manually or write a script that does it for you.  Or you could
simply update tar. :-)

Lately I noticed that the tar version used by the BSDs also doesn't
understand Pax extended headers.  I guess they're not that popular a
feature.

[But this was with older versions of git / cogito, so I'm not sure if
this still applies.]

Nothing has changed in this respect, basicly since git-tar-tree went in.

René