[Rd] "R CMD check" accepts but "R CMD INSTALL" rejects a tar ball.

[Hin-Tak Leung]

--- On Fri, 1/4/11, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:

> ?untar:
> 
>      You may see warnings from the
> internal implementation such as
>      
>      unsupported entry type 'x'
> 
>      This often indicates an invalid
> archive: entry types ‘"A-Z"’ are
>      allowed as extensions, but other
> types are reserved (this example
>      is from Mac OS 10.6.3).  The
> only thing you can do with such an
>      archive is to find a ‘tar’
> program that handles it, and look
>      carefully at the resulting files.
> 
> 
> So the difference is whether you use external or internal
> tar. 'g' is the global pax header extension so the format
> you created is really pax and not tar (pax defines two new
> types 'x' and 'g').
> 
> Cheers,
> Simon

Okay, thanks. So I guess git-archive --format=tar uses GNU tar extensions (not too surprising). So this is documented... and a documented incompatibilities between different tar/tar extensions. But this behavior of R is a bit unexpected - When R CMD check (which involves installing to a temporary location then loads it and runs various things) works and R CMD INSTALL itself does not.
 
OTOH, should this be reported to the GIT people?


> 
> 
> On Apr 1, 2011, at 10:19 AM, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> 
> > I have somehow managed to made a source tar ball which
> "R CMD check" accepts but "R CMD INSTALL" rejects with:
> > 
> > ------------------
> > Warning in untar2(tarfile, files, list, exdir) :
> >  checksum error for entry 'pax_global_header'
> > Error in untar2(tarfile, files, list, exdir) :
> unsupported entry type ‘g’
> > ------------------
> > 
> > This happens with both R 2.12.2 (x86 linux) and R svn
> (x86_64 linux). Since R CMD check does install as part of
> the check process, there is probably a bug somewhere. The
> tar ball is uploaded at:
> > 
> > http://htl10.users.sourceforge.net/tmp/Matrix_0.999375-48.tar.gz
> > 
> > and tar -xzpvf works. It is possible to do R CMD
> INSTALL from the untar'ed data, so I am a bit lost at where
> the problem is.
> > 
> > The tar ball was generated with 
> >   git archive ... | gzip >
> package.tar.gz
> > similar to the example at the bottom of git-archive.
> > 
> > It is the result of git cherry-pick trunk at 2658 +
> Matrix-for-R-2.13 at 2657 .
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
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> 
>