Re: git archive generates tar with malformed pax extended attribute
From: René Scharfe <hidden>
Date: 2019-05-25 13:27:18
Am 24.05.19 um 10:13 schrieb Jeff King:
On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 09:35:51AM +0200, Keegan Carruthers-Smith wrote:quoted
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I can't reproduce on Linux, using GNU tar (1.30) nor with bsdtar 3.3.3 (from Debian's bsdtar package). What does your "tar --version" say?bsdtar 2.8.3 - libarchive 2.8.3Interesting. I wonder if there was a libarchive bug that was fixed between 2.8.3 and 3.3.3.quoted
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Git does write a pax header with the commit id in it as a comment. Presumably that's what it's complaining about (but it is not malformed according to any tar I've tried). If you feed git-archive a tree rather than a commit, that is omitted. What does: git archive --format tar c21b98da2^{tree} | tar tf - >/dev/null say? If it doesn't complain, then we know it's indeed the pax comment field.It also complains $ git archive --format tar c21b98da2^{tree} | tar tf - >/dev/null tar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.Ah, OK. So it's not the comment field at all, but some other entry.quoted
Some more context: I work at Sourcegraph.com We mirror a lot of repos from github.com. We usually interact with a working copy by running git archive on it in our infrastructure. This is the first repository that I have noticed which produces this error. An interesting thing to note is the commit metadata contains a lot of non-ascii text which was my guess at what my be tripping up the tar creation.Yeah, though the only thing that makes it into the tarfile is the actual tree entries. I'd imagine the file content is not likely to be a source of problems, as it's common to see binary gunk there. Most of the filenames are pretty mundane, but this symlink destination is a little funny: $ git archive ... | tar tvf - | grep nicovideo4as.swc lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2019-05-24 03:05 libs/nicovideo4as.swc -> PK\003\004\024 That's not the full story, though. It is indeed a symlink in the tree: $ git ls-tree -r HEAD libs/nicovideo4as.swc 120000 blob ec3137b5fcaeae25cf67927068af116517683806 libs/nicovideo4as.swc But the contents of that blob, which should be the destination filename, are definitely not: $ git cat-file blob ec3137b5f | wc -c 57804 $ git cat-file blob ec3137b5f | xxd | head -1 00000000: 504b 0304 1400 0800 0800 5069 694e 0000 PK........PiiN.. There's quite a bit more data there. And what tar showed us goes up to the first NUL, which does not seem surprising.
That (the symlink target) is a ZIP file with the following contents: Length Method Size Cmpr Date Time CRC-32 Name -------- ------ ------- ---- ---------- ----- -------- ---- 39733 Defl:N 3403 91% 2019-03-09 13:10 489e1be1 catalog.xml 54131 Defl:N 54151 0% 2019-03-09 13:10 32f57322 library.swf -------- ------- --- ------- 93864 57554 39% 2 files And link targets longer than 100 characters are encoded in an extended Pax header. (Usually symlink targets are paths, not file contents.)
It's possible Git is doing the wrong thing on the writing side, but given that newer versions of bsdtar handle it fine, I'd guess that the old one simply had problems consuming poorly formed symlink filenames.
Git preserves symlink targets with embedded NULs in the repository and in generated tar files. Not sure if GNU tar and bsdtar truncating them at the first NUL is a bug. I'm also not sure if there is a platform that would allow creating such a symlink in the file system, or how one is supposed to use it. We could truncate symlink targets at the first NUL as well in git archive -- but that would be a bit sad, as the archive formats allow storing the "real" target from the repo, with NUL and all. We could make git fsck report such symlinks. Can Unicode symlink targets contain NULs? We wouldn't want to damage them even if we decide to truncate. René