Re: Systems with non-posix TAR implementations: How to handle

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 19:50, René Scharfe [off-list ref] wrote:

Am 26.04.2010 17:55, schrieb Tor Arntsen:

[..]

quoted

*** t0024-crlf-archive.sh ***
*   ok 1: setup
* FAIL 2: tar archive

[..]

quoted

The problem with that test is that the Tru64 V5.1 'tar' says 'This
doesn't look like a tar archive' on the generated file. However, it
turns out that the tar file generated by 'git archive --format=tar' is
fine, it's just that it's a POSIX tar archive and the Tru64 'tar'
program isn't POSIX tar format compatible.
How should we handle this? Just ignore errors in this test on Tru64,
or is there some other way that I missed?

That depends: if you just want to make sure that the test works fine,
you could install GNU tar, perhaps as gtar, and let TAR in Makefile (or
config.mak) point to it.  If the test fails with a tar that understands
the format then you've found a bug.

Done. Everything's fine with gtar. As far as the OSF1 'make test' is
concerned I've re-run it with gtar, native compiler and
SHELL_PATH=<self-compiled-bash>, and everything looks fine except some
UTF8 conversion tests which may be caused by some iconv lib issues on
this platform.

It could get a bit more complicated if you want to use git archive to
create tar files that the native tar can understand.  For most repos it
should be sufficient to specify a tree instead of a commit, e.g. with an
added colon:

       git archive -o archive-without-comment.tar HEAD:

This makes git archive leave out the comment entry, which might upset
some tar implementations.  I don't know if that's sufficient to make
Tru64 tar happy, though.

It indeed is happy with that, this will be very useful to know when
working on OSF1 and only having the native tar application.

Thanks,
-Tor