Re: git-archive's wrong documentation: really write pax rather than tar

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 4, 2011, 01:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20110804014143.GA32579@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1312409879.97173.YahooMailClassic@web29501.mail.ird.yahoo.com>

On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 11:17:59PM +0100, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> The summary of the problem is that, git-archive's "--format=tar"
> option really write the pax format most of the time, and some
> cross-platform archive extraction library (rather than the
> all-powerful GNU tar) really does not think that's the tar format and
> bail out.

Out of curiosity, what is the library? Putting pax headers into ustar format has been standardized in POSIX since 2001.

> Is it possible to (1) add a warning in the man-page, or (2) actually
> fix the problem in git-archive ( archive-tar.c ) to generate more
> conformant archive packages?

That header contains useful information (the commit id from which the archive was generated). And there is a way to turn it off: give a tree id instead of a commit id. There is an example in the git-archive manpage that does exactly this already. Look for the example mentioning "pax header" here:

  http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-archive.html

It might be a bit more obvious to find if we actually had a --no-pax-header option, though.

-Peff