Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 02:15:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net> To: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> Cc: Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.ORG>, <current@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: WARNING! New GNU Tar in 5-CURRENT could erroneously create world writeable dirs Message-ID: <20020606235414.G28206-100000@blues.jpj.net> In-Reply-To: <20020607022829.GF21901@dan.emsphone.com>
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Dan Nelson wrote: > > The latest version on ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar/ is 1.13. The ones on > > ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/tar/ (and everything else on that site) are > > considered unstable. I suppose it's too late to suggest tar 1.13 as a > > starting point, but maybe this could be kept in mind when importing other > > GNU products. The point I was trying to make is perhaps better conveyed by ftp://alpha.gnu.org/README . > Tar 1.13 is 3 years old, and has many bugs (incremental backups are > unusable, for example). I don't know why the GNU tar programmers decide that certain versions are stable and others are unstable. I do know that the former are found on ftp.gnu.org, and the latter on alpha.gnu.org. Now you know too, in case you didn't already. :-) I just discovered Jorg Schilling's "star" (http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/star.html) . He says that it supports POSIX.1-2001, which I assume dates from last year. It's available in the ports collection and it's under the GNU GPL. The documentation for GNU tar 1.13.25 says that it complies with POSIX 1003.1b, which was drafted in 1987 and completed in 1990. The GNU tar in FreeBSD-STABLE is from 1993 and it still works most of the time! According to Mr. Schilling's testing, GNU tar 1.13.25 has a bug: ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/testscripts/README.gtarfail . I guess it qualifies as a "non-trivial program". :-) On my friend's BSD/OS system, there is no tar--or rather, it's just a hard link to pax: % ls -li `which tar` `which pax` 1819 -r-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 58288 Jun 12 1998 /bin/pax 1819 -r-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 58288 Jun 12 1998 /bin/tar Their tar/pax hybrid must check its argv[0]. Isn't that evil? -- Trevor Johnson To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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