Re: Removing Mac OS X resource forks from distribution tarballs

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Dave Hart wrote on Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 08:46:56AM CEST:
> Apparently,
> there is no command-line switch to disable generation of ._
> psuedofiles in tarballs, but there is an undocumented environment
> variable that so modifies tar behavior,
> COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true. For reasons unknown outside the
> bowels of One Infinite Loop, this was renamed to the
> far-less-appropriate COPYFILE_DISABLE as of the Leopard release of Mac
> OS X.  [1]
> 
> When the build triplet matches *-apple-darwin*, Automake could include
> in the distdir target code to set both of the undocumented environment
> variables to true.  That presumes no Automake clients find the
> extended attributes and resource forks in tarballs valuable.

Right.  And since we don't know that (well, at least I don't), it would
be prudent to make it configurable.  Well, we can just say that the poor
Mac users can configure it by setting COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE
and/or COPYFILE_DISABLE in their environment in their shell startup
script, and stop worrying about any changes to Automake.  ;-)

Thanks,
Ralf

> [1] http://norman.walsh.name/2008/02/22/tar