Bazaar Export Command Not Handling Long Path Names

[Guido Ostkamp]

On Wed, 21 May 2008, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> We use python's built in 'tar' library for creating the tarballs, it is 
> possible it doesn't know how to handle long filenames.

Bazaar uses the 'tarfile' module in its 
.../site-packages/bzrlib/export/tar_exporter.py where it executes

   import tarfile
   ...
   ball = tarfile.open(dest, 'w:' + compression)
   ...
   for dp, ie in entries:
     ...
     ball.addfile(item, fileobj)
   ball.close()

the tarball.py resides at .../lib/python2.5/tarfile.py and includes

   def tobuf(self, posix=False):
     ...
     if posix:
       ...
       if len(self.linkname) > LENGTH_LINK:
         raise ValueError("linkname is too long (>%d)" % (LENGTH_LINK))

         if len(name) > LENGTH_NAME:
           prefix = name[:LENGTH_PREFIX + 1]
           while prefix and prefix[-1] != "/":
             prefix = prefix[:-1]

             name = name[len(prefix):]
             prefix = prefix[:-1]

           if not prefix or len(name) > LENGTH_NAME:
             raise ValueError("name is too long")
     else:
       if len(self.linkname) > LENGTH_LINK:
         buf += self._create_gnulong(self.linkname, GNUTYPE_LONGLINK)
       if len(name) > LENGTH_NAME:
         buf += self._create_gnulong(name, GNUTYPE_LONGNAME)

so it is perfectly aware of GNU long pathname support and

   class TarFile(object):
     ...
     posix = False

defines 'posix' as false, so I suppose bazaar should be able to handle 
long filenames in tarballs provided you do have a Python distro like the 
above (the example above is Python 2.5.1 out of the box).

Regards

Guido