should "tar t" map UIDs to usernames?

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at mindspring.com
Tue Apr 18 14:51:46 UTC 2006


On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Natanael Copa wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> > as you can see, default GNU tar is to map UIDs to names, while BB
> > tar doesn't.  to be consistent, should it?
>
> Does this means busybox tar will not unpack the tar package with
> correct user permissions, if the same username has different UID's
> on different systems?

just to expand on my previous response, the original issue was
strictly an aesthetic one -- how the contents of a tarball were being
displayed, with no regard to doing the actual extraction.

regarding extraction, i would imagine that the standard behaviour
would be that the contents would be extracted and given the owner and
group of the person doing the extraction (unless overridden by
something equivalent to --same-owner in GNU tar).

rday

p.s.  as i think about it more, it seems that the majority of use for
BB tar would be doing extraction onto the target system from tarballs
that were created elsewhere (package installation, that sort of
thing).

this suggests that, if one was thinking about adding extra
functionality to BB tar, it would be most worth it adding extra
GNU-like extraction options (perhaps going as far as having an entire
"Extraction options" sub-menu).

just thinking out loud.



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