Re: many packages FTBFS, if $TAPE is set
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> This thread has concentrated on fixing packages, but I would appreciate
> a little insight into why someone might set TAPE in their environment by
> default. Surely if you set it by default, you must realse that you're
> asking any such invocation of tar to write over your tape? Why would
> anyone do that? It's not as if Debian packages are the only software
> that might run tar without -f, so even if they were all fixed, setting
> TAPE by default would be an incredibly risky thing to do.
It used to be that tar always used the tape device as a default device.
The Unixes that I learned on all behaved this way, so I'm used to always
using f if I want to write to a file. However, tar was built with one
default device, usually /dev/rmt0 or the like, and if the primary tape
drive on the system was some other device, setting TAPE globally was
useful. After all, everyone knew that running tar without an f flag meant
to use the tape, so pointing it to the right tape drive made things
easier.
Those days are long past now, and even tape drives are rarer than they
used to be, but all it takes is to have such an environment setting left
over from old dotfiles that have been carried around ever since. Default
environment variable settings tend to be like that at a lot of sites. No
one remembers what they're there for, so no one wants to go to the work to
remove them.
In other words, I expect the intention was never to change from a default
of standard output, but instead was to change the default tape device with
a tar that never had standard output as a default.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: