Subject: Re: Big problems with snapshot/20000226, part 1
To: Paul Hoffman <phoffman@proper.com>
From: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com>
List: current-users
Date: 03/02/2000 13:40:07
On Thu, Mar 02, 2000 at 08:17:10AM -0800, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> I made the floppies from the directory, booted, and started a clean install 
> using the default partitioning and just the non-X sets, getting them with 
> FTP. This is on a Pentium system with a 13 Gig hard drive. Towards the end 
> of the tar for base.tgz, it starts kicking out errors of not being able to 
> set the date and permissions on folders it is creating because / is full. 
> The directories it is complaining about are created, and they seem to have 
> perfectly reasonable times on them, but after the base.tgz untarring, it 
> says errors were encountered.

This is a totally silly bug related to the use of 'pax' instead of 'tar'
on the install floppies.  As it extracts, pax writes out a list of file
times and permissions into a file in /tmp so it can apply them in one
pass at the end of the extraction.  Unfortunately, this file doesn't fit
on the MFS's /tmp.

A trivial workaround, though one I am hesitant to apply to the source tree, 
would be to have sysinst set the environment variable TMPDIR to "/mnt"
before calling pax.

Another, related bug is that if you try to extract the sets by hand,
from the floppy environment, you have to be quite careful because pax-as-tar
doesn't assume -p if you're running as root, as GNU tar does.  So, you must
use 'tar xpzf ...' where with the old tar you could use 'tar xzf ...' to
get the permissions right.

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
	"And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?"