Re: [Bug-tar] star <-> GNU tar interchange issue

[Mark]

On Mon, March 25, 2013 12:57, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Mark <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> I noticed a strange problem when using GNU tar to unpack an archive
>> which I had created using star. I'm not sure whether this is a bug
>> with star or GNU tar. The problem seems to be related to a file and/or
>> directory name having an o-umlaut character (ö).
>>
>> I used this command to create the archive:
>> star -c f=test_star.tar artype=xustar -numeric -sparse -force-hole
>> "Sven-Göran Eriksson's World Challenge SLES-50852"
>
> What kind of locale are you using?
> From the attached tar archive, it looks like you are using an UTF-8 based
> locale wich on UNIX is still less probable than using a ISO-8859-1 based
> locale.

I created the archive on a system running Lubuntu 11.10. The output of the
locale command is
$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
[... all other LC_xxx are "en_GB.UTF-8" too]
LC_ALL=

As far as I know, that's the OS installation default and I did not change it.

A quick google search produced this result from 2007, about someone else
for whom the default UTF-8 en-GB locale used by Ubuntu caused issues vs
ISO 8859-1:
http://blog.andrewbeacock.com/2007/01/how-to-change-your-default-locale-on.html


> In case of a sparse file, the prefix path part of a POSIX.1-1988 tar
> header is reused for sparse information and for this reason, the
> filename does not fit into the simple tar header anymore.
>
> For this reason, the filename is expressed in an extended tar header.
>
> Filenames in extended tar headers need to be converted into UTF-8 and
> as star still asumes the most probable ISO-8859-1 on UNIX, there is an
> unneeded conversion.
>
> If people start using UTF-8, it seems to be the time to let star check for
> the real locale encoding....

Thanks for the explanation. I suppose a workaround for the time being
would be to change my system's locale to ISO-8859-1.


-- Mark