Hi Kent, * Kent Boortz wrote on Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 04:30:29PM CET: > 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?
If you have a configure test which will find a good tar program for you, then invoke this test before AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE and store the result in $am_cv_prog_tar_ustar. If you don't have a configure test, then you can still teach your users to override the Automake default setting with ./configure am_cv_prog_tar_ustar=... [...] > 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 If it is possible to generate a broken/unextractable archive on one system, then we could start thinking about adding a configure test to automake/m4/tar.m4. But regardless of that, may I ask you to report this issue to bug-tar at gnu.org if you haven't already? Thanks, Ralf > 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
