freebsd stable - Feb 2019 - Status of libarchive/bsdtar maintainership

Hi!

I wonder what is status of our contrib/libarchive and bsdtar/bsdcpio etc. in
modern versions of FreeBSD
in a sense of serious bug fixing. Long story short: I faced a bug in the
libarchive bundled with 11.2
that makes it impossible to create reliable backups of live file system or its
subtree
using cron+bsdtar utility that delegate actial work to the libarchive that just
aborts
if a file disappears (is removed) in process (GNU tar continues with just
warning).

This is serious issue for me as I used 'tar' command to make backups for
distinct subtrees
since FreeBSD 6.x and when my GPS+ntpd subsystem went insane and shifted system
clock to 3 years
in the future, I lost data in several thousands of RRD databases and looked for
backups to restore them
and found only small portion of databases in the tar instead of full backup.

I've create the PR https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233006
and later attached a patch
solving the problem in same way as GNU tar deals with it.

Martin Matuska (mm) asked me to create an issue at GitHub for libarchive.
I have no GitHub account nor I need one, and he was so kind and created it
himself:
https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1082

Almost 3 months have passed and no response from upstream.
Should we go ahead and fix it despite of it is part of contrib?

On Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 8:22 PM Eugene Grosbein <eugen at grosbein.net wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I wonder what is status of our contrib/libarchive and bsdtar/bsdcpio etc.
> in modern versions of FreeBSD
> in a sense of serious bug fixing. Long story short: I faced a bug in the
> libarchive bundled with 11.2
> that makes it impossible to create reliable backups of live file system or
> its subtree
> using cron+bsdtar utility that delegate actial work to the libarchive that
> just aborts
> if a file disappears (is removed) in process (GNU tar continues with just
> warning).
>
> This is serious issue for me as I used 'tar' command to make
backups for
> distinct subtrees
> since FreeBSD 6.x and when my GPS+ntpd subsystem went insane and shifted
> system clock to 3 years
> in the future, I lost data in several thousands of RRD databases and
> looked for backups to restore them
> and found only small portion of databases in the tar instead of full
> backup.
>
> I've create the PR
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233006 and later
> attached a patch
> solving the problem in same way as GNU tar deals with it.
>
> Martin Matuska (mm) asked me to create an issue at GitHub for libarchive.
> I have no GitHub account nor I need one, and he was so kind and created it
> himself:
> https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1082
>
> Almost 3 months have passed and no response from upstream.
> Should we go ahead and fix it despite of it is part of contrib?
>
If you fix it, protocol is to submit it upstream first. It causes fewer
problems in the long run. While it is tempting to just fix it in FreeBSD
and move on, almost every time we've done that in the past someone else has
had to come in and fix the mess.

Do you have a fix? Can you put it up for review somewhere? We are no where
near a release, so there is no reason to rush this in.

Warner
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