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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Apr 1, 2011, at 12:16 PM, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

> --- 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?
> 

I think you should re-read my e-mail more carefully -- those are not GNU extensions, those are headers used by pax, not tar. pax is a format inspired by tar and introduced in POSIX.1-2001, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_(Unix)

Cheers,
Simon


>> 
>> 
>> 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 .
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org
>> mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> 
>> 
> 
>