GNU tar damage for the 5000th time, was Re: [Zope] z2 startup exception

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Sep 22 16:56:51 EDT 2003


On Monday 22 September 2003 03:31 pm, Jamie Heilman wrote:
> This is usually indicitive of Zope being unpacked with something other
> than GNU tar.
> 
> You know, for the frequency this problem occurs you'd think something
> could actually be done about it that would solve it forever.  Waiting
> for all the versions of tar in the world to suddenly agree on how to
> handle path names containing over 100 characters isn't a terribly
> effective approach.  What would be really swift, is if Zope Corp just
> restructured their code so there were no longer any paths that
> exceeded said limit.

Well, since Gnu Tar is available to everyone, I think it *is* a worldwide
open standard on how to handle long pathnames in tar files. Other tar
programs apparently do not handle them at all.  So I think there's
a pretty clear cut case here that those other tar programs are
simply broken.  And anyway, how many tar programs are you aware
of? The broken tar I know of is specifically the System 5 derived tar
that comes with Solaris -- are there others?

The lesson is, if you have Solaris, your first step is to throw out
all the utilities and install the Gnu versions.  They are AFAICT,
without exception better software.

Otherwise, while you're at it, you might as well convert all the
filenames to 8.3 notation since DOS and VMS can't handle long
filenames.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I don't have much sympathy for
pandering to broken programs. There's too much *useful* stuff ZC
could be spending their time on, to waste energy working
around broken and obsolete utilities.  I'd *much* rather see a
solid Zope 3 with component/interface model as promised.

Just my two cents, ;-)
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com




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