[Rd] reg-tests-1.R failure with unstable

[Prof Brian Ripley]

I have committed a workaround that works with bsdtar under Snow 
Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) for me.

We have seen rather too many problems with incompatibility of tar 
formats recently (and it is documented to be ASCII only and has 
restrictions to 100 bytes for file paths), so have alternatives under 
consideration.

On Sun, 25 Oct 2009, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Oct 2009, Hiroyuki Kawakatsu wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009, Hiroyuki Kawakatsu wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I am getting an error from one of the test files
>>> tests/reg-tests-1.R using the unstable version (r50179).
>>> (i've learned my lessons; this is a clean build.) The tail
>>> of reg-tests-1.Rout.fail is
>>> 
>>> Loading required package: myTst
>>> building package pkgA ...
>>> installing package pkgA using file pkgA_1.0.tar.gz ...
>>> Error in as.octmode(mode) : invalid digits
>>> Error in install.packages(r, lib = "myLib", repos = NULL, type = "source") 
>>> :
>>>  (converted from warning) installation of package 'pkgA_1.0.tar.gz'
>>> had non-zero exit status
>>> Execution halted
>> [...]
>> 
>> I think I have tracked this down to the following line in utils:::untar2()
>>        mode <- rawToChar(block[101:107])
>> mode contains a trailing space as in "000755 " which causes the invalid
>> digits error in as.octmode(). If I change the line to
>>        mode <- rawToChar(block[101:106])
>> untar2("pkgA_1.0.tar.gz") unpacks the test package but I, of course,
>> do not know whether this is a general fix.
>> 
>> Am I the only one seeing this problem (FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT)?
>
> Seems this is a bug in the tar program on your OS: this should be 
> '0000755(nul)' in the 8 bytes 101:108. And that's in every account of the tar 
> format I have found, including the former POSIX standard.
>
> (Note to Peter D: we don't use getOct for this one, as it is not a field that 
> is allowed to be space-padded.)
>
> I guess we need to work around this ... to a large extent we have got away 
> with using tar format in the past because everyone was using GNU tar, but 
> others are coming into use.
>
> [A quick check confirms that bsdtar from the libarchive project does this, as 
> used by Snow Leopard and AFAIK FreeBSD >= 8.  So I can reproduce it.]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595