Austin Group Minutes of the 11 September Teleconference Austin-189 Page 1 of 1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group.              September 12, 2003

Attendees

Andrew Josey, The Open Group
Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat
Mark Brown, IBM, TOG OR 
Don Cragun , Sun, PASC OR


Apologies 
Dave Butenhof, HP
Nick Stoughton, USENIX, WG15 OR
Joanna Farley, Sun 

XCU
--
XCU ERN 23 OPEN will discuss on the next call.

XCU ERN 10 (Leave open for one more week)

The groups considered Geoff Clare's email on XCU ERN 10.
They decided that perhaps the best course is not to 
require any one action but to allow either for now,
and document a future direction to consider tightening this in
the future.

Proposed TC change 

 "c_nlink       Contains the number that is at least
 the number of links in this archive
 referencing the file at the time the archive was created".

Rationale : future direction may change it to exactly.

Geoff responded by email:
That's very close to what I proposed at the end of austin-group-l 5613:

    At this point, I think the only solution that could achieve consensus is
    to require c_nlink to be set to a value "greater than or equal to the
    number of links in the archive referencing the file".  (My personal
    preference would be to require that it is >= st_nlink, but I would
    accept the above as a compromise.)

The main difference is that I left off "at the time the archive was
created".  I don't think it makes sense to keep that part.

However, that was all before the issue of the pax -a option arose
(see austin-group-l 5658).  The only way I can think of to deal with
that problem would be something like this:

    c_nlink       Contains a number greater than or equal to the
    number of links in the archive referencing the file.
    If the -a option is used to append to a cpio archive, then the
    pax utility need not account for the files in the existing part
    of the archive when calculating the c_nlink values for the
    appended part of the archive, and need not alter the c_nlink
    values in the existing part of the archive if additional files
    with the same c_dev and c_ino values are appended to the archive.

I would also recommend adding something to APPLICATION USAGE warning
about the use of the -a option with cpio archives, such as:

    Caution is advised when using the -a option to append to a
    cpio format archive.  If any of the files being appended happen
    to be given the same c_dev and c_ino values as a file in the
    existing part of the archive, then they may be treated as links
    to that file on extraction.  Thus it is risky to use -a with cpio
    format except when it is done on the same system that the original
    archive was created on, and with the same pax utility, and in
    the knowledge that there has been little or no file system
    activity since the original archive was created that could lead
    to any of the files being appended being given the same c_dev and
    c_ino values as an unrelated file in the existing part of the
    archive.  Also, when (intentionally) appending additional links
    to a file in the existing part of the archive, the c_nlink values
    in the modified archive can be smaller than the number of links
    to the file in the archive, which may mean that the links are not
    preserved on extraction.



XSH 
---
XSH 76 A list of cancellation points has been circulated.
Agreed to delay for one more week to get expert input.

XBD
----
XBD ERN 34 Accept


XSH Post tc2
----------------

XSH Number 1
The group agreed that this was an editorial matter.
Andrew will generate an errata, and send it to the IEEE.
We are allowed to include errata in the TC2.

XCU
We were unable to determine the page/line numbers and
have requested further information from the submitter.


Next Steps
-----------
Andrew will update the aardvark reports on the web site with the
latest information .  The next call is Sep 18.