[Bug-tar] Check nano seconds (nsec) to accurate; extract of sym-links fails

[Raphael Bossek]

Dear tar people,

I felt today into trouble after an upgrade to 1.15.91 version of tar on my 
Debian GNU/Linux machine.

I'm running a little bit complecate environment (Debian-> UserModeLinux-> 
loopback mounted file as ext3) where extractions of a tar archive with 
sym-links fails (only 0 byte files are there). Tar extraction is not 
interrupted!

The tar arhive is extracted within UserModeLinux on the loopback mounted fs.

I invested some time to identify the problem because I thouhght is a problem of 
me. Now here is my patch to fix TAR:

--- lib/timespec.h.orig 2006-07-19 16:01:51.000000000 +0200
+++ lib/timespec.h      2006-07-20 08:22:57.000000000 +0200
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@
 {
   return (a.tv_sec < b.tv_sec ? -1
          : a.tv_sec > b.tv_sec ? 1
-         : a.tv_nsec - b.tv_nsec);
+         : 0);
 }

 # if ! HAVE_DECL_NANOSLEEP

---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---

For my opinion is to accurate to check nano seconds (nsec) to identify files 
with stat(), lstat() and fstat() in src/extract.c when process symbolic links!

I get all the time a difference in the UserModeLinux -> loopback mounted fs 
while extracting (maybe my machine is too slow AMD3.2GHZ). Despite that why 
it's important to diff in nano seconds ?

Looking for a solution,
Raphael Bossek
-- 


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