Re: Solaris tar issues, or other reason why margay fails 010_pg_basebackup?

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 7:17 PM Marcel Hofstetter
<hofstetter@jomasoft.ch> wrote:
> Is there a way to configure which tar to use?
>
> gnu tar would be available.
>
> -bash-5.1$ ls -l /usr/gnu/bin/tar
> -r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin      1226248 Jul  1  2022 /usr/gnu/bin/tar

Cool.  I guess you could fix the test either by setting
TAR=/usr/gnu/bin/tar or PATH=/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH.

If we want to understand *why* it doesn't work, someone would need to
dig into that.  It's possible that PostgreSQL is using some GNU
extension (if so, apparently the BSDs' tar is OK with it too, and I
guess AIX's and HP-UX's was too in the recent times before we dropped
those OSes).  I vaguely recall (maybe 20 years ago, time flies) that
Solaris tar wasn't able to extract some tarballs but I can't remember
why...  I'm also happy to leave it at "Sun's tar doesn't work for us,
we don't know why" if you are.