My interpretation of the early test results reported here is that tar is indeed detecting a change in ctime and nothing more serious. There are two possible solutions to this: patch tar, or patch dpkg. I'm going to advocate that we patch dpkg.
My reasoning goes like this: the decision to have tar report an error condition for non-fatal errors, and to report it with a different exit code than for fatal errors, was a deliberate one by the tar maintainer. We may disagree with that decision, but the fact is, a version of tar has been released in which this change was implemented, and there is no reason to believe that the tar developer would reverse the decision if asked. For example, a related issue was raised on the bug-tar list three years ago, and received the answer "we are doing the conservative thing and won't change". See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2004-03/msg00010.html . A request for a separation of exit codes is: http://lists.gnu.org/ archive/html/bug-tar/2005-01/msg00053.html . Another relevant message which explains why the error code was changed for the non- fatal situation is: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2006-10/ msg00021.html . A comment about implementation is found here: http:// lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2006-10/msg00024.html . Anyway, my conclusion from all of this is that the two-exit-code status of tar is here to stay, at least for now. And while Apple is currently using tar-1.15.x, we have no control over when they might change to tar-1.16.x. Thus, switching to /usr/bin/tar surrenders any control we might have over the problem, and patching tar itself dooms us to continue patching tar forever. This is why I advocate patching dpkg so that when calling tar, it checks the exit code and only dies if tar had a fatal error. Of course, we'll need to make the new dpkg package depend on the new tar package, but this should not be a problem. (Note that dpkg- bootstrap, on the other hand, should rely on /usr/bin/tar and should *not* get this change.) -- Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
