Re: refactoring basebackup.c

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> It turns out that these commits are causing failures on prairiedog.
> Per email from Tom off-list, that's apparently because prairiedog has
> a fussy version of tar that doesn't like it when you omit the trailing
> NUL blocks that are supposed to be part of a tar file.

FTR, prairiedog is green. It's Noah's AIX menagerie that's complaining.

It's actually a little bit disturbing that we're only seeing a failure
on that one platform, because that means that nothing else is anchoring
us to the strict POSIX specification for tarfile format. We knew that
GNU tar is forgiving about missing trailing zero blocks, but apparently
so is BSD tar.

One part of me wants to add some explicit test for the trailing blocks.
Another says, well, the *de facto* tar standard seems not to require
the trailing blocks, never mind the letter of POSIX --- so when AIX
dies, will anyone care anymore? Maybe not.

regards, tom lane