Re: [Bug-tar] bad treatment of symlinks

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Andries E. Brouwer <address@hidden> ha escrit:

> I just looked at tar.info:
> 
> # This manual is for GNU `tar' (version 1.26, 12 March 2011)
> #
> # with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts ...

The changes Paul referred to are quite recent and therefore are
still in the repository:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=d0dd0473d

> so maybe that version from March 2011 is not yet acceptable,

Perhaps, but the next release will certainly be.

> [I know that there is a --warning option (undocumented in the
> help message or on the man page)

For what it's worth, it is fully documented in tar.info.  Even if
it is absent from the distribution, you can always access it online:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/warnings.html

>  tar: foo: implausibly old time stamp 1970-01-01 01:00:00
>
> Clearly that is undesirable. One point of view is that it is none of
> tar's business to complain about time stamps.

I disagree.  It is definitely tar's business to complain about failed
disk operations, isn't it?  Now, what happened is that tar attempted to
restore timestamp of a file it had recently extracted and failed to do so.
This failure may or may not indicate a serious problem, therefore it is
only a warning.

> In a case like this "the right thing" would be to give this message
> five times, and upon the 6th say "further timestamp warnings suppressed;
> to see them all, give the --allfoo option, to see none, use --nofoo.]

That would be OK if such a flood of warnings were considered
normal, which it is not.  In my opinion, the right thing is to discover
the reason for that strange behavior and fix it in the first place.
Unfortunately, the information you provided is not sufficient for
that.  Could you give us more detail?  What was the tar version you
used?  On what OS and what kind of file system?  What were the command
line options?

Regards,
Sergey