[libvirt] Bump tar format?

Andrea Bolognani abologna at redhat.com
Wed Jul 22 14:44:56 UTC 2015


Hi everyone,

commit cc3d52e[1] has apparently broken 'make dist' for at least some
platforms: Fedora 20 is fine[2], but both Fedora 21 and rawhide[3][4]
are currently failing. My laptop is running Fedora 22 and can make
dist just fine, which is of course very confusing.

The issue is caused by the following tar error:

  tar: libvirt-1.2.18/tests/nodeinfodata/linux-deconfigured-cpus/     \
       node/node0/cpu16/topology/core_siblings_list:                  \
  link name is too long; not dumped

There seem to be basically two ways to solve the failure:

  1. rename the test case, making it shorter;

  2. bump tar format from ustar, which has limitations on the length
     of file names, to posix/pax, which has no such limitations.

I'm not a fan of the former option because short names are usually very
opaque, see tests/nodeinfodata/linux-test[0-8] for some perfect
examples.

On the other hand, I'm not sure whether bumping the tar version would
affect portability in a significant way: the automake documentation[5]
reports that

  this format is very young and should probably be restricted to
  packages that target only very modern platforms

but the GNU tar documentation[6], while containing some warnings as
well, suggest that this format is going to become the default.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Cheers.


[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2015-July/msg00662.html
[2] https://ci.centos.org/view/libvirt-project/job/libvirt-daemon
-rpm/systems=libvirt-fedora-20/327/
[3] https://ci.centos.org/view/libvirt-project/job/libvirt-daemon
-rpm/systems=libvirt-fedora-21/327/
[4] https://ci.centos.org/view/libvirt-project/job/libvirt-daemon
-rpm/systems=libvirt-fedora-rawhide/327/
[5] https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/List-of
-Automake-options.html
[6] http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_chapter/tar_8.html
-- 
Andrea Bolognani
Software Engineer - Virtualization Team




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