Re: default tar format for "make dist" and patch file length

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2021-11-17, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> skribis:
>
>> Ideally, "guix lint" would be run and issues fixed before applying
>> patches ... !
>
> On the bright side, that there’s just a dozen of issues on 20K packages
> suggests it’s usually run.  :-)
>
> I think we’re used to running it for new packages but not when modifying
> an existing package, which is probably when issues like that are
> introduced.

Sounds plausible.

My guess is this is triggered from folks using "git format-patch" and
dumping the files into gnu/packages/patches, which probably has a
default length that is a little too long in this case.

Another option that would help a little would be to drop the .patch
suffix, it's kind of redundant to have gnu/packages/patches/*.patch

>> Is it worth adding an inexpensive check to etc/git/pre-push that also
>> checks for file-length and fails to push due to this issue potentially
>> breaking "make dist"?
>
> Could be.

This basically mimics the check that guix-lint does:

for p in $(find gnu/packages/patches -type f ) ; do
  if [ "$(echo guix-2.0.0rc3-10000-1234567890/${p} | wc -c)" -ge "99" ]
  then
    echo $p
    exit 1
  fi
done

Would something like that be cheap enough to consider adding to
etc/git/pre-push? Are "find" and "wc" reasonable dependencies to assume
they are available?

Obviously, have to wait until they are all fixed, some of which probably
require going through core-updates... or start with a more conservative
but still useful length-check.


>> A different angle might be to actually use a different tar format:
>>
>>   https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/Formats.html
>>
>> I would guess "make dist" is using the tar "v7" format, based on the 99
>> character length limit for files. Most of the other formats have no file
>> length limit or a longer limit.
>
> Yes, we could also do that.

Struggling to figure out how to do that; seems automake is very inclined
to use the old format... anyone with sufficient auto* skills to try and
upgrade the "make dist" to pass one of the newer --format= arguments to
tar?


live well,
  vagrant

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