Re: [Duplicity-talk] Tarfile support

[Rob Browning]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

> As long as we provide a way for the user to extract files just given
> our archives (say via duplicity, or some other command line tool),
> then I think this would be fine.

It would also be extremely helpful to be able to have a tool or some
other way to manipulate the archives without manually
extracting/rearchiving them.  i.e. to collapse some set of archives
(to remove no longer needed intermediate incrementals), to delete
unwanted files or directories in an archive, etc.

  duparchive mv archive-1 home/foo home/bar
  duparchive collapse --to archive-1 archive-1 archive-2 archive-3
  duparchive rm -r archive-1 home/foo

etc.

Though there's definitely a convenience argument here, there's also a
safety argument.  Unless you know that the system on which you'll be
extracting/manipulating/rearchiving a given archive (set) still has
exactly the same set of users and groups as the system on which the
archive was made, you have to worry about ending up with a result
archive that has the wrong ownership information.  With tar, you can
use --numeric-owner to try to address this problem, but then you may
still have another safety issue -- you may temporarily create files in
your filesystem (perhaps even suid files) that have unintended local
owners.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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