I cannot reproduce the problem that you observe. With tar 1.24 and 1.25, I get the same 60753920-byte file that you generate with tar 1.23. I also get the same file if I use tar 1.15.1. I am building tar on RHEL 5.5 (x86-64) with GCC 4.5.1; except that the 1.15.1 tar is that of RHEL 5.5 itself.
> But between tar 1.23 and 1.24, tar began to > output smaller tarballs for some inputs than it had before, which > while surely a good thing in general unfortunatly breaks pristine-tar. > > -rw-r--r-- 1 joey joey 60753920 Nov 10 03:03 1.23/recreatetarball > -rw-r--r-- 1 joey joey 60856320 Nov 10 17:38 1.24/recreatetarball There seems to be some kind of confusion here, as the 1.24 tarball that you generate is larger than than the 1.23 tarball you generate. But you write that it is smaller. You might want to look at your setup to see why your results differ from mine. I do notice that the tarballs differ in their representation of this file: icedove-l10n-3.1.6/upstream/af/chrome/locale/af/messenger/addressbook/replicationProgress.properties This file name is exactly 100 bytes long, and if I recall, that used to be a problem area in GNU tar. The 1.24 tarball contains a longlink representation of the file (which isn't right), whereas the 1.23 tarball is right. Perhaps you got a prerelease version of 1.24, with bugs? Did you build 1.24 from sources yourself? Have you tried with 1.25? What platform are you running GNU tar on, and how do you build GNU tar? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org