archive formats supported by libarchive, with some information about
the relative strengths and weaknesses of each format and notes about
issues with libarchive's support for those formats.
This page should make it unnecessary to list all of the libarchive
formats in the manpage of each program that uses libarchive.
Such programs can simply refer to libarchive-formats(5).
The new fflags support in archive_entry supports Linux and FreeBSD
file flags and is a bit more gracious about unrecognized flag names
than strtofflags(3). This involves some minor API breakage.
The default tar format ("restricted pax") now enables pax extensions
when archiving files that have flags. In particular, copying dir
heirarchies with 'bsdtar cf - -C src . | bsdtar xpf - -C dest' now
preserves file flags. (Note the "p" on extract!)
While I'm here, fill in some additional explanation in the
archive_entry.3 manpage, fill in some missing MLINKS, mark some
overlooked internal functions 'static', and make a few minor style
fixes.
try to set ACLs even if fflag restore fails, first cut at reading
Solaris tar ACLs
Code improvement: merge gnu tar read support into main tar reader;
this eliminates a lot of duplicate code and generalizes the tar
reader to handle formats with GNU-like extensions.
Style: Makefile cleanup, eliminate 'dmalloc' references, remove 'tartype'
from archive_entry (this makes archive_entry more format-agnostic)
Thanks to: David Magda for providing Solaris tar test files
with 'star' ACL handling, though there's still a
bit more work needed in this area.
Added 'write_open_fd' and 'read_open_fd' to simplify, e.g.,
tar's u and r modes. Eliminated old 'write_open_file_position'
as a bad idea. (It required closing/reopening files to
do updates, which led to unpleasant implications.)
Various other minor fixes, API tweaks, etc.
* Disabled shared-library building, as some API breakage is
still likely. (I didn't realize it was turned on by default.) If
you have an existing /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2, I recommend deleting it.
* Pax interchange format now correctly stores and reads UTF8
for extended attributes. In particular, pax format can portably
handle arbitrarily long pathnames containing arbitrary characters.
* Library compiles cleanly at -O2, -O3, and WARNS=6 on all
FreeBSD-CURRENT platforms.
* Minor portability improvements inspired by Juergen Lock
and Greg Lewis. (Less reliance on stdint.h, isolating of
various portability-challenged constructs.)
* archive_entry transparently converts multi-byte <-> wide character
strings, allowing clients and format handlers to deal with either
one, as appropriate.
* Support for reading 'L' and 'K' entries in standard tar archives
for star compatibility.
* Recognize (but don't yet handle) ACL entries from Solaris tar.
* Pushed format-specific data for format readers down into
format-specific storage and out of library-global storage. This
should make it easier to maintain individual formats without mucking
with the core library management.
* Documentation updates to track the above changes.
* Updates to tar.5 to correct a few mistakes and add some additional
information about GNU tar and Solaris tar formats.
Notes:
* The basic 'tar' reader is getting more general; there's not much
point in keeping the 'gnutar' reader separate. Merging the two
would lose a bunch of duplicate code.
* The libc ACL support is looking increasingly inadequate for my needs
here. I might need to assemble some fairly significant code for
parsing and building ACLs. <sigh>
Portability: Thanks to Juergen Lock, libarchive now compiles cleanly
on Linux. Along the way, I cleaned up a lot of error return codes and
reorganized some code to simplify conditional compilation of certain
sections.
Bug fixes:
* pax format now actually stores filenames that are 101-154
characters long.
* pax format now allows newline characters in extended attributes
(this fixes a long-standing bug in ACL handling)
* mtime/atime are now restored for directories
* directory list is now sorted prior to fix-up to permit
correct restore of non-writable dir heirarchies
Unfortunately, the stock zlib.h is not:
line 885: 'err' parameter shadows global 'err' definition from <err.h>
Back the WARNS level down to 3 to accomodate borked zlib.h.
What it is:
A library for reading and writing various streaming archive
formats, especially tar and cpio. Being a library, it should
be easy to incorporate into pkg_* tools, sysinstall, and any
other place that needs to read or write such archives.
Features:
* Full automatic detection of both compression and archive format.
* Extensible internal architecture to make it easy to add new formats.
* Support for "pax interchange format," a new POSIX-standard tar format
that eliminates essentially all of the restrictions of historic formats.
* BSD license
Thanks to: jkh for pushing me to start this work, gordon for
encouraging me to commit it, bde for answering endless style
questions, and many others for feedback and encouragement.
Status: Pretty good overall, though there are still a few rough edges and
the library could always use more testing. Feedback eagerly solicited.
