Contained are two patches:
eisenmann.patch - a modified version of OP Simon
Eisenmann's patch that prevents tarfile.py from setting
the size attribute for directory members.
posix.patch - Simon brought up another issue:
tarfile.py operates in posix mode by default. My
original idea behind this was that it provides a higher
portability to other archiver programs (if they adhere
to the posix standard). Simon states that e.g. WinZip
is not able to read posix-compliant tar archives but
those with GNU extensions. So I think the idea of being
as portable as possible has proven false. GNU tar
format is a quasi-standard.
The second issue is that posix mode imposes several
limits - on pathname lengths in particular - since GNU
extensions are not allowed. For the average user, this
must be annoying, he does not care about posix and all
this portability stuff, he simply wants to add files
regardless of the length of their pathnames. But he
first has to search the docs and set TarFile's posix
attribute to False to enable GNU extensions. Even worse
is that e.g. backup scripts that run flawlessly for
months can suddenly fail just because there's a new
file with a long pathname that posix mode cannot handle.
To cut a long story short, I second Simon's proposal.
Since I contributed tarfile.py to Python's stdlib I had
the feeling I had made the wrong decision.
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