tar binary in RTools 3.1.0.1939 has problems with tar.bz2 files

From: "Duncan Murdoch" <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
To: "Dan Tenenbaum" <dtenenba at fhcrc.org>, "R-devel" <r-devel at r-project.org>
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 1:00:04 PM
Subject: Re: [Rd] tar binary in RTools 3.1.0.1939 has problems with tar.bz2 files

On 22/11/2013 2:51 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:

Hi,

With Rtools 3.1.0.1936 I can create and extract from .tar.bz2
files:

(first directory in %PATH% is c:\rtools31.1936\bin)

E:\>tar jcvf tmp.tar.bz2 tmp
tmp/
tmp/foo.txt

E:\>tar jtvf tmp.tar.bz2
drwxr-xr-x 4294967295/4294967295 0 2013-11-22 11:35 tmp/
-rw-r--r-- 4294967295/4294967295 3 2013-11-22 11:35 tmp/foo.txt

E:\>mkdir ex

E:\>cd ex

E:\ex>tar jxvf ..\tmp.tar.bz2
tmp/
tmp/foo.txt

E:\ex>cd ..

E:\>rm -rf ex

...but this fails when using the tar binary in Rtools 3.1.0.1939.
The following lines are run with c:\rtools31.1939 as the first
directory in %PATH% (and there is only one Rtools installation
referenced in %PATH% in both these examples):

E:\>tar jcvf tmp.tar.bz2 tmp
tmp/
tmp/foo.txt

E:\>tar jtvf tmp.tar.bz2

E:\>mkdir ex

E:\>cd ex

E:\ex>tar jxvf ..\tmp.tar.bz2

E:\ex>ls

E:\ex>

Can this be fixed?

The tar.exe is identical in those two versions of Rtools, just the
Cygwin DLLs (and a few other utilities) changed.  So I suspect this
is
something else, or perhaps a bug in the new Cygwin DLLs -- but the
old
Cygwin DLLs don't work on Win 8.1.

Some things you could try:

Just use the old Rtools.

Use the Cygwin tar.exe (available from Cygwin) instead of ours.  At
the
time we made our custom tar.exe, the Cygwin one would not support
Windows drive specs, but perhaps the current one does.

Use something else, e.g. bzip to decompress, then tar to get from the
tar.

Duncan Murdoch