Re: GNU libtool-2.4.6 released [stable]

[Gary V. Vaughan]

> On Mar 23, 2015, at 2:42 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Mon, 23 Mar 2015, Christian Rössel wrote:
>> 
>> Dear Gary,
>> 
>> thanks for libtool-2.4.6!
>> 
>> I discovered some files in 
>> http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.4.6.tar.gz that IMO don't belong 
>> there. The filenames start with "._" (just do a 'find . -name "._*"') and 
>> seem to contain dropbox meta data.
> 
> I see the same issue with 2.4.5, but not with 2.4.4 (and earlier).
> 
> The 'file' command describes these as "AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file".
> 
> It does not seem possible that these files were listed for inclusion in the 
> release so they must be an artifact of the 'tar' program used.
> 
> Bob

Since releasing 2.4.4 I upgraded my Mac OS release a few times, more recently 
without a full complement of side loaded GNU utilities (which helped flag many 
GNUisms in the gnulib release scripts).

Most likely, Apple's tar is passing along file system metadata for the 
destination machine :-(

While I won't be rolling any future releases, it definitely seems worth noting 
in the README-release notes that before uploading, to a) use GNU tar b) check 
that there are no weird hidden files in the tarball!

Cheers,
Gary