Automated builds from tar archives are not working

[sharkwouter]

Summary

It turns out that the file command is broken, which is used by the makepkg command. This makes makepkg think that tar.gz files are gzip archives, making it use gzip to extract it. The result is that tar files are not extracted fully, causing failures.

Details

The makepkg command uses the following file command:

file -S -bizL -- "$file"

The file variable is set to the archive name.

Here is an example in what that results in on alpine:

application/x-empty; charset=binary compressed-encoding=application/gzip; charset=binary

On Arch and Debian 12 (which use the same version of file) this results in the following with the same file:

application/x-tar; charset=binary compressed-encoding=application/gzip; charset=binary

This is not fixed on alpine edge.

Possible solutions

At the moment I see the following options:

• Fix this in alpine
• Use an older alpine version
• Patch pacman to just try bsdtar if the archive is seen as empty

I don't think there are many other ways around this one.

[sharkwouter]

Here is how the arch package is build: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/file/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD#L33

Here is how the alpine package is build: https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/main/file/APKBUILD#n25

[sharkwouter]

There is a fix for it upstream in file, but it is not available in a new release yet: file/file@1dd21dd

I tested this fix and it did not resolve the problem.

[sharkwouter]

I made an upstream issue: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/15047

[sharkwouter]

This was resolved upstream now in Alpine 3.18. I'll test it out

[sharkwouter]

This has been resolved now thanks to the upstream fix.