Joerg Schilling wrote:
Note that this are mailing lists for CD/DVD writing and not lists
for ignoring GNU tar problems. You are off topic.
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:
My use dates back to the early Linux days, and I have not had such a
problem. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that I have NEVER
personally had a failure of an uncorrupted gnu tar output.
If you do not use GNU tar frequent enough, or you may do too simple things.
Download tar packaged software and unpack it. Very simple thing, but
the thing which the original poster couldn't do with an star archive.
- Mysql uses GNU tar to create their distribution and publish
archives that are so extremely broken, that only some GNU tar
version can unpack them.
Having unpacked on RH8, 9, and FC1, FC3. FC4 and FC6, I repeat that
it's not a common problem even if you can identify some broken tar which
doesn't unpack. You don't want star blamed for broken unpackers, yet you
seem to be blaming GNU tar for the same thing. I assume "only some GNU
tar versions" means the ones which some distribution didn't screw up.
This sounds as funny as a person from GB saying: "We in GB of course
drive on the _right_ side of the street".
I am careful with my statements and it may be that some of the bugs are
fixed in unpublished versions of GNU tar.
I reported these bugs to the GNU tar maintaners first in 1993. I have been
ignored. Aprox. 2 years ago, many other people started to report the same
problems. Since then this repeats every few months:
- The maintainers claim that the problems have been fixed.
- A few months later other people report the same problems
with the current version of GNU tar.
The repeated problems are:
1) GNU tar sometimes writes
"... skipping to next header" because it incorrectly asumes
that the archive has broken headers.
2) Restoring incremental backups does not work. It seems that
this has never ever tested in a systematic way as my tests
for star did fail immediately.
I'm sorry that star failed, if that comes from adding changes on the
end of an archive (append) I can believe it hasn't been heavily tested,
most people put each incremental backup in a separate file to allow
restoring to any given level. Note: I'm not saying that's better, just
that in my experience people don't append incremental data to archives.
3) ~ 5% of the multi-volume continuation archives are not accepted
as valid continuation.
With the latest GNU tar version you are able to create standard compliant
archives but this is still not done by default.
For portability that's probably a good decision, since GNU tar "old
format" seems to unpack with GNU tar, star, Solaris tar, and even the
old Sys-III, SysV, and SysVR4 tar implementations.
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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