Re: disarchive: disassemble then assemble tarball

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Mon, 03 Apr 2023 at 14:19, Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com> wrote:

> The ‘assemble-tarball’ procedure assumes (without checking) that it has
> access to a copy of its input in the “workspace” directory.  Normally,
> it would be called from the generic ‘assemble’ procedure, which ensures
> this (and also checks the output).  It probably just wrote all the
> tarball headers without the file contents, producing a corrupt tarball.
> Indeed, if you set up logging (using ‘%disarchive-log-port’) it prints a
> bunch of “Ignoring irregular file” warnings.

Ok, but I was expecting a kind of identity when composing
’disassemble-tarball’ and ’assemble-tarball’.  And even, that the
identity properties of assembling some disassembling would be some
tests. :-)


>> Well, I am not sure to understand why the name “my-gnu”.
>
> It’s just ‘(basename "my-gnu.tar" ".tar")’.  The names are designed to
> aid a human while debugging.  To my knowledge, Disarchive doesn’t use
> them for anything.  You can use set the name by passing “--name” to the
> ‘disassemble’ subcommand.

Thanks for explaining.


> In other words, it’s your old nemesis:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-03/msg00063.html
>
> :)  (I tease only because it’s confused me many times too!)

Arf, probably because the behaviour appears to me unexpected. :-)

Well, maybe some convention with trailing / would be helpful, as with
’rsync’.


Cheers,
simon