On Wednesday 20 September 2006 05:56, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>> On Sat, 9 Sep 2006, Josef Wolf wrote:
>> > On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 03:34:42PM -0400, Jean-Louis Martineau wrote:
>> > >    * Works with GNU tar 1.15.91 - work with new gtar state file
>> > > format.
>> >
>> > Can someone please explain what this exactly means?
>>
>> The format to store information about the incrementals was changed.
>> Since Amanda made some assumptions about this format (while she
>> shouldn't have cared, and just considered it as opaque files), this
>> broke Amanda.
>> After the fix, Amanda just treats the files as opaque files.
>>
>> But be careful, at least the tar 1.15.91-2 from Debian is broken: it
>> ignores the --one-file-system option when doing incrementals, causing
>> exorbitant backup sizes for any level > 0. I don't know about the
>> upstream version, but since this bug has been reported almost 2 months
>> ago, I'm afraid that one is broken, too.
>
>Apparently the problem is more subtle. Thanks to the Debian bug tracking
>system, I noticed this:
>
>http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=384508
>tar: -l option changed meaning, without any warning!
>
>Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
>
>      Geert
>
Good Grief Charley Brown!

Tar is supposed to be a stable, mature utility is it not?  I mean its what, 
30 years old, existing in the various *nix's long before gnu took over?  
Whyinhell can't the folks over at gnu.org find something else to screw 
with besides tar?  It doesn't _need_ to be on their WPA or CCC lists as a 
makework project when there's nothing else to do around the office.

According to 
<http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Option-Summary.html>
the --one-file-system option still exists, but must be spelled out as shown 
here.  The -l option now checks hard links.

So amanda CAN be fixed, but is tars option buffer big enough to do the job 
when we have to spell every option out in order to protect us from such 
future actions?

I feel rather strongly about this, so gnu AT gnu DOT org has been added to the 
Cc: 
list.  They need to know how the users feel about such shennanigans.

I wasn't able to find the docs for 1.15-1 on their site, so I have no idea 
if this might explain the rash of small estimates I'm getting that 
occasionally overrun my nominally 8GB vtape size by as much as 1.5GB!

Question for the gnu folks: can you please tell us when this "-l" option 
was actually changed to be the hardlink checking function from the 
formerly used shorthand for the --one-file-system option?

I'm tempted to recompile my amanda to use the 1.13-25 version that also 
exists on my system and see if this small estimate problem goes away.  I'd 
do that right now, except it seems I must have finally, after a year of 
running 1.15-1, deleted the older version.  Searching local repos..  Ok, 
this version of 1.13-25 is now installed and will be used by amanda 
tonight: 

tar-1.13.25-14.1.legacy.i386.rpm

I have a suspicion this MAY be the broken 1.14, with RH fixes since fedora 
doesn't ever advance to the next major version of anything...  Spoils the 
image of wanting everyone to do a fresh install to get the latest.  We're 
the guinea pigs and test monkeys of the development lab you know. Grrr.

Stay tuned for any noticeable diffs in the next few runs, which I'll 
report.  If it fubars, then I have an rpm of the real 1.13-25 here too...

>--
>Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 --
> geert AT linux-m68k DOT org
>
>In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker.
> But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something
> like that. -- Linus Torvalds

Thanks for the heads-up Geert.  Unforch, its seems gnu.org had hidden all 
previous versions of tar on a hard to find subpage, but versions back to 
1.14 can yet be had there.  And we ALL know about that one.  What we do 
know isn't printable for mixed company though. :(

Thanks.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.