Hi, My real question is, how can I specify what TAR to use in "make dist", and avoid GNU TAR for my packaging, when 'tar-ustar' is specified to automake?
Now the longer story ;) As most systems I build on now have a system TAR that knows the USTAR format, I did some experiments with specifying this in automake AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.9 tar-ustar]) GNU autotools versions used autoconf 2.63 automake 1.10.2 libtool 2.2.6 What I understand from reading the produced "configure" script, and from my experiments, when the user invoke the configure script it tries hard to find GNU TAR, then falls back and try find other TAR implementations. I have GNU tar in path, but the Solaris TAR first, still Solaris TAR is skipped and the GNU tar is picked. The exact line in resulting Makefile will be am__tar = gtar --format=ustar -chf - "$$tardir" The problem is, even with GNU TAR 1.22 the format it produces is not fully compatible with most other USTAR TAR implementations I have tried. These I found could not unpack the test TAR I produced with GNU TAR and the flag "--format=ustar" AIX 5.3 HP-UX 11.11, 11.23, 11.31 Solaris 8, 9, 10, 11 SCO OpenServer 6 I tried the small snippet below. Then distributed the resulting TAR to the AIX, HP-UX and other hosts, and tried unpack it there with the TAR that came with that operating system. If I packed with GNU TAR they could not unpack it correctly (only the top directory was created), if packed with Solaris TAR all could unpack it, even GNU TAR # I try be as nice as I can, 98 + 20 + 77 should be within USTAR # format limits even if one or two chars are wasted on '\0' or the # '/' delimiter a=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa b=bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb c=ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc rm -fr $a mkdir -p $a/$b touch $a/$b/$c # GNU TAR gtar --format=ustar -cf foo.tar $a # Solaris TAR #/usr/bin/tar -cf foo.tar $a Do you know how can I specify what TAR to use in "make dist", and avoid GNU TAR for my packaging, when 'tar-ustar' is specified to automake? I can of course solve this by adding an extra step after "make dist", unpack the produced source TAR using GNU TAR and repack it with Solaris TAR again... ;) kent -- Kent Boortz, Senior Production Engineer Sun Microsystems Inc., the MySQL team Office: +46 863 11 363 Mobile: +46 70 279 11 71
