Re: [PATCH 3/3] sanity: Add check for tar older than 1.28

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, 2019-11-21 at 13:14 -0600, Mark Hatle wrote:
> On 11/21/19 12:09 PM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> > On Thu, 2019-11-21 at 19:09 +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 04:54:12PM +0000, Richard Purdie wrote:
> > > > Any suggestions on how we fix it?
> > > 
> > > My preferred solution would be to replace CentOS 7 with CentOS 8
> > > as supported distribution, which would also allow to drop hacks
> > > for two major releases of gcc in various places.
> > 
> > We are working towards that, equally the older version support is
> > useful to a significant portion of our userbase so its a balancing
> > act.
> 
> RHEL 7 is still heavily used.  But if we can provide a buildtools-
> tarball that includes a new enough tar, that should be able to
> workaround the issue.

After some discussion, this is the direction we've gone. Debian 8 also
has the issue. On the autobuilder we've installed buildtools-tarball on
that and the Centos7 workers.

> > > If all other supported distribution already ship 1.28 this would
> > > solve your problem.
> > 
> > I believe that is now the case, yes.
> > 
> > > > (We could make opkg-utils-native depend on tar-native but for
> > > > most
> > > > people that isn't necessary so it seems a shame).
> > > 
> > > Building tar-native is not something that would strike me as 
> > > problematic.
> > 
> > Its an extra build dependency and extra build time, just
> > complicates
> > things. "tar-native" is in ASSUME_PROVIDED and gives bootstrap
> > issues
> > although we have the "tar-replacement-native" mechanism to account
> > for
> > this already. So possible but not entirely straightforward.

For fun I tried this. It exploded in circular dependency problems :(.

> Requiring a newer version, and suggesting to the user to use a
> buildtools-tarball (SDK) I think is a reasonable compromise.

Agreed, we reached the same conclusion. I'll tweak the patch to improve
the error message to the user.

Cheers,

Richard