[boost] Tarball issues [Was: boost v 1.33 ?]

From: Aleksey Gurtovoy (agurtovoy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-03 02:41:03

Caleb Epstein writes:
> On Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:31:53 +0100, Stefan Slapeta <stefan_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> This is a typical error that occurs after an incomplete tarball download
>> (which happens quite frequently, and _when_ it happens, its
>> reproducible, say, you can't download a complete tarball then for about
>> an hour! I always thought this is a problem of our proxy.)
>> At least, this says that the utils directory isn't on your hard disk.
>> Just test the integrity of your tarball...
>
> And so it is.  I've run into this once before but I guess I forgot
> this answer.
>
> I suspect that I grabbed the tarball while it was still being
> created.  If this is the case, can the tarball script be modified to
> create the file using a temporary name and then removing the old
> file and renaming the new one when tar finishes?

It's not the case, but obviously something's fishy with the tarball
creation. We'll look into it.

>> 
>> BTW, it's strange that the testing script continues even if the
>> tarball isn't complete. Isn't there an error reported from the
>> extraction routine??
>
> It appears then when the Python TarFile object is used in pipe mode,
> it is unable to detect errors in the file it is processing.  I took a
> 100k chunk of the boost-CVS-HEAD.tar.bz2 tarball and ran it through
> the following code:
>
> import tarfile
> import sys
>
> for file in sys.argv[1:]:
>     tarfile.open (file, "r|bz2").list()
>
> The program proceeds to list the first 200+ entries in the truncated
> tarfile, and then exit silently.  If the mode string is changed to
> "r:bz2", the initial 200+ entries are again listed, but the corruption
> is detected and an exception is thrown.
>
> I'd suggest that regression.py be changed to use the "r:" mode syntax
> (assuming this doesn't try and decompress the entire file in-core)

Done. The script will update itself automatically on the next run, or
you can get the new version manually at
http://www.meta-comm.com/engineering/boost/regression.tar.gz.

Thanks for researching this!

-- 
Aleksey Gurtovoy
MetaCommunications Engineering