On the state of 'tar'

[Vanessa McHale]

FWIW, the tar format is a mess, which is part of why I chose to bind to libarchive (with all the difficulties) instead of writing my own library. There’s a nice post here: https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar <https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar>

There’s also archive-sig (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/archive-sig <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/archive-sig>) which tries to be a “common interface” via backpack and has implementations such as archive-tar-bytestring (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/archive-tar-bytestring <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/archive-tar-bytestring>) that can be swapped out with libarchive/tar proper so you don’t need to commit to any one library. 

Cheers,
Vanessa McHale

> On Apr 7, 2020, at 11:50 AM, hasufell <hasufell at posteo.de> wrote:
> 
> Friends,
> 
> 'tar' [0][1] is an excellent native haskell implementation of the tar
> format. However, there are currently a lot of unattended issues:
> 
> * unicode filepaths broken due to Char8 use [2]
> * executable bits handled improperly [3]
> * no support for long filepath extension [4][5]
> * doesn't handle hardlinks properly [6]
> * handles symbolic links too strictly [7]
> 
> Most of these issues are 2 to 4 years old, some of them have PRs that
> have never been reviewed.
> 
> 'tar' fails to unpack our own ghc bindists even [4]. I consider it, in
> this state, too unreliable for production use. Since it is in the
> 'haskell' namespace on github and probably the first hit on hackage,
> this needs to be improved quickly, IMO.
> 
> Users currently can use tar-bytestring [8] (no windows support) or
> libarchive [9] (not a native implementation), but 'tar' should
> ultimately be fixed and maintained properly.
> 
> --
> [0] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tar
> [1] https://github.com/haskell/tar
> [2] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/6
> [3] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/25
> [4] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/49
> [5] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/27
> [6] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/51
> [7] https://github.com/haskell/tar/issues/32
> [8] https://github.com/hasufell/tar-bytestring
> [9] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/libarchive
> --
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Julian
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