On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Gene Heskett wrote:
> 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:
> >> 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!
> 
> 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?

tar-1.15.91/NEWS states:

| version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, (CVS version)
| 
| * Incompatible changes
| 
| ** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
| with UNIX98.  This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
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