Bug#4084: New tar may be broken.

[Rob Browning <osiris@cs.utexas.edu>]

Package: tar
Version: 1.11.11-1

On an older version, you could tar relative symlinks just fine.  You'd
get a Broken pipe message, but it would work without any serious error
messages (version 1.11.8-5):

# cd /; tar cf - System.* | (cd /tmp; tar xf -)
Broken pipe
# ls -l /tmp
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           21 Aug  7 21:35 System.map -> boot/System.map-2.0.9
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           21 Aug  7 21:35 System.old -> boot/System.map-2.0.7
#  

With the new version here's what happens:

# cd /; tar cf - System.* | (cd /tmp; tar xf -)
tar: System.map: Could not change access and modification times: No such file or directory
tar: System.map: Cannot change mode to 0755: No such file or directory
tar: System.old: Could not change access and modification times: No such file or directory
tar: System.old: Cannot change mode to 0755: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed at end of execution
# ls -l /tmp/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           21 Aug  7 21:35 System.map -> boot/System.map-2.0.9
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           21 Aug  7 21:35 System.old -> boot/System.map-2.0.7
#

Perhaps this is not serious, but when you're untarring a large archive
with alot of symlinks it sure can look like something horrible is
going wrong.

Is this the desired behavior?
--
Rob