Georg S. Weber wrote:
> As usual,
> 
> tests are needed. There were problems in the past with the pretty old
> and outdated "tar" on Mac OS X 10.4.11. As long as this continues to
> work OK "out of the box", I'm fine with changes. Could you place
> somewhere a "foobar.tar.bz2" where the "new" tar is used, so others
> can check it out?
> 
> Cheers,
> Georg

I created the latest (version 1.22 GNU tar), using:

$ ./configure DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT=POSIX

It passes all tests

## ------------- ##
## Test results. ##
## ------------- ##

70 tests were successful.
7 tests were skipped.

(Coincidently, 7 tests were also skipped on my Sun Ultra 27. My 3.33 GHz Xeon 
managed to beat sage.math by around 12 seconds, which made me feel good!).

I copied the latest 'tar' to /bin/tar.new on sage.math.

So if you use tar.new, you will use version 1.22, if you use 'tar' you will get 
the older version.

kir...@sage:~$ tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.19

kir...@sage:~$ tar.new --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.22

The main difference between them is seen when you use tar --help

kir...@sage:~$ tar --help

<SNIP tons of stuff>

*This* tar defaults to:
--format=gnu -f- -b20 --quoting-style=escape --rmt-command=/usr/sbin/rmt
--rsh-command=/usr/bin/rsh

If instead you use tar.new,

kir...@sage:~$ tar.new --help

you will see at the end:

*This* tar defaults to:
--format=posix -f- -b20 --quoting-style=escape
--rmt-command=/usr/local/libexec/rmt --rsh-command=/usr/bin/rsh

So the old version is defaulting to writing in 'gnu' format, and the new 
version 
is defaulting to writing in 'posix' format, which according to the GNU tar 
manual, will be the default soon. (On either one, you can change the format 
with 
an option. But I personally would prefer to see the version updated, so it 
defaults to a POSIX format. That way, nobody needs to worry about options.)

There is to my knowledge only one .spkg in Sage which *needs* GNU tar. I can't 
however recall what that is. I know if it was extracted with GNU tar, then 
created with Sun's tar, it worked fine. I would need to find what that package 
is, then recreate it.

Hopefully, if it was created with the tar.new, it might actually extract with 
Sun's tar, which would avoid Solaris users having to mess around getting GNU 
tar 
in their path. (It is actually on a default install of Solaris 10, but it needs 
to be copied and renamed, so is a bit of a pain).

There are other more portable formats for tar, but they have limitations, which 
might be significant in Sage, though I doubt it.

http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/tar/Formats.html

But I'm not suggesting we make 'tar' default to some old format, but to the 
POSIX spec.

Anyway, give it a try. If if works for everyone, I would propose the current 
tar 
is renamed to tar.old, and the new one renamed to 'tar'.


Dave



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