Re: CVS commit: src/external/bsd/libarchive/dist/libarchive

On Mon, Aug 24, 2026 at 12:42:33PM +0100, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
> How was the archive extracted before?  Did it turn into a file called
> `???.py' (i.e., with literal question marks)?

Yes:
meson_python-0.20.0/tests/packages/encoding/???.py

> I suspect that the code was only `working' by accident before, i.e.,
> failing to report failure and blithely barging ahead with output that
> the libarchive authors thought of as corrupted, having had replacement
> characters substituted where the input can't be represented.
> 
> On a Debian system (where bsdtar is presumably using GNU iconv), if I
> try this, it fails in exactly the same way with LANG=C and works with
> LANG=C.UTF-8.  archivers/bsdtar is built without any iconv at all, so
> it rejects the archive altogether no matter what your locale is!  And
> as far as I know, there's no way to ask bsdtar/libarchive to just
> treat each path as a sequence of bytes without interpretation.

I guess I'll switch the affected packages to GNU tar then, which
extracts the exact binary sequence and reports no error:

meson_python-0.20.0/tests/packages/encoding/<E3><83><86><E3><82><B9><E3><83><88>.py

# ls -al
total 40
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   144 Aug 24 12:51 .
drwxr-xr-x  41 root  wheel  1872 Aug 24 12:51 ..
-rw-rw-r--   1 root  wheel   210 Jun 10 19:15 meson.build
-rw-rw-r--   1 root  wheel   162 Jun 10 19:15 pyproject.toml
-rw-rw-r--   1 root  wheel    92 Jun 10 19:15 ?????????.py
# ls | hexdump -C
00000000  6d 65 73 6f 6e 2e 62 75  69 6c 64 0a 70 79 70 72  |meson.build.pypr|
00000010  6f 6a 65 63 74 2e 74 6f  6d 6c 0a e3 83 86 e3 82  |oject.toml......|
00000020  b9 e3 83 88 2e 70 79 0a                           |.....py.|
00000028
#

Personally I'm not quite sure if I want a tar tool to convert between
encodings. Is the base encoding included in the tar file? If not, how
does the unpacking tar know how it should interpret the byte sequence?
It could be EUC-JP for all we know.
 Thomas