Re: Extra data in gnome-bluetooth tarballs

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 05:00:30AM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-03-26 at 15:46 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
> > There is something strange going on in the gnome-bluetooth tarballs.
> > Some of these tarballs have at least 12MB of additional data. Maybe the
> > tarball was concatenated together or something.
[..]
> From the file listings here:
> http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-bluetooth/2.91/
[..]
> Huh. The only thing I could see in the newer builds was:
> tar: gnome-bluetooth-2.91.92/docs/reference/libgnome-bluetooth/html/gnome-bluetooth-bluetooth-chooser.html: file name is too long (max 99); not dumped
> tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
> gtar: gnome-bluetooth-2.91.92/docs/reference/libgnome-bluetooth/html/gnome-bluetooth-bluetooth-chooser.html: file name is too long (max 99); not dumped
> gtar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
[..]
> Is this a problem in tar, or in the code calling it then?

That 99 max reminds me of the way it generates the tarball:
http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/Options.html#Options

tar-v7
tar-ustar
tar-pax

If you put tar-ustar or tar-pax in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE, maybe then it
works? I don't know which one is best though. It says tar-ustar is
pretty new, and tar-pax is really new and might not be supported...

Checking:
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/Formats.html
| Archive format defined by POSIX.1-2001 specification. This is the most
| flexible and feature-rich format. It does not impose any restrictions on
| file sizes or file name lengths. This format is quite recent, so not all
| tar implementations are able to handle it properly. However, this format
| is designed in such a way that any tar implementation able to read
| ʽustarʼ archives will be able to read most ʽposixʼ archives as well,
| with the only exception that any additional information (such as long
| file names etc.) will in such case be extracted as plain text files
| along with the files it refers to. 

Tar calls it 'posix', not 'pax'. From above, I think it is best to
choose tar-pax (as tar-ustar programs should support tar-pax pretty much
automatically).

I guess this should be a GnomeGoal or something
(https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/ModernAutotools).
-- 
Regards,
Olav