R devel - Oct 2009 - reg-tests-1.R failure with unstable

Hi,

I am getting an error from one of the test files
tests/reg-tests-1.R using the unstable version (r50179).
(i've learned my lessons; this is a clean build.) The tail
of reg-tests-1.Rout.fail is

Loading required package: myTst
building package pkgA ...
installing package pkgA using file pkgA_1.0.tar.gz ...
Error in as.octmode(mode) : invalid digits
Error in install.packages(r, lib = "myLib", repos = NULL, type =
"source") :
  (converted from warning) installation of package 'pkgA_1.0.tar.gz'
had non-zero exit status
Execution halted

The error from as.octmode() appears to be coming from R CMD
INSTALL. If I unpack pkgA_1.0.tar.gz, 'R CMD INSTALL pkgA'
from the source tree works fine. However, 'R CMD INSTALL
 pkgA_1.0.tar.gz' returns the error. I am wondering whether
this is specific to my OS (FreeBSD).  Any pointers for
debugging would be appreciated.

h.
-- 
+---
| Hiroyuki Kawakatsu
| Business School, Dublin City University
| Dublin 9, Ireland. Tel +353 (0)1 700 7496

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009, Hiroyuki Kawakatsu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am getting an error from one of the test files
> tests/reg-tests-1.R using the unstable version (r50179).
> (i've learned my lessons; this is a clean build.) The tail
> of reg-tests-1.Rout.fail is
>
> Loading required package: myTst
> building package pkgA ...
> installing package pkgA using file pkgA_1.0.tar.gz ...
> Error in as.octmode(mode) : invalid digits
> Error in install.packages(r, lib = "myLib", repos = NULL, type =
"source") :
> ?(converted from warning) installation of package 'pkgA_1.0.tar.gz'
> had non-zero exit status
> Execution halted
[...]

I think I have tracked this down to the following line in utils:::untar2()
        mode <- rawToChar(block[101:107])
mode contains a trailing space as in "000755 " which causes the
invalid
digits error in as.octmode(). If I change the line to
        mode <- rawToChar(block[101:106])
untar2("pkgA_1.0.tar.gz") unpacks the test package but I, of course,
do not know whether this is a general fix.

Am I the only one seeing this problem (FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT)?

h.
-- 
+---
| Hiroyuki Kawakatsu
| Business School, Dublin City University
| Dublin 9, Ireland. Tel +353 (0)1 700 7496

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
[...]
> Seems this is a bug in the tar program on your OS: this should be
> '0000755(nul)' in the 8 bytes 101:108. And that's in every
account of the
> tar format I have found, including the former POSIX standard.
>
> (Note to Peter D: we don't use getOct for this one, as it is not a
field
> that is allowed to be space-padded.)
>
> I guess we need to work around this ... to a large extent we have got away
> with using tar format in the past because everyone was using GNU tar, but
> others are coming into use.
>
> [A quick check confirms that bsdtar from the libarchive project does this,
> as used by Snow Leopard and AFAIK FreeBSD >= 8. ?So I can reproduce it.]
Thanks for the confirmation. I installed gtar and, as indicated by config.site,
it is picked up by configure and I now pass -gmake check-.

h.
--
+---
| Hiroyuki Kawakatsu
| Business School, Dublin City University
| Dublin 9, Ireland. Tel +353 (0)1 700 7496