Re: Silence "can't translate pathname" warnings

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

Hi all,

On 09/12/12 07:59, Sorin Stefan Nicolin wrote:
> I am using tarsnap with the --quiet option but is still get warnings like these (which I think are harmless):
> tarsnap: var/www/xxx:Can't translate pathname 'var/www/xxx' to UTF-8

Yes, those are harmless, unless you want to extract an archive onto a system
with different locale settings *and* get pathnames translated.  The file is
being stored, but its path is being stored as a "raw" sequence of bytes
rather than being converted to UTF-8 and stored that way.

This is really something of a "POSIX is weird" issue -- because the "pax"
format (which is a sort of extended tar format, and is what tar actually
uses these days) was designed for copying data between machines, it says
that names should be converted to UTF-8 when archives are created and then
converted back when archives are extracted.  This makes for that purpose,
but doesn't make so much sense when tar is used for *backups*, since in
general backups will be extracted on the same (or very similar) systems to
where they were created.

My current plan is to
1. Disable archive name translation by default,
2. Add a --translate-pathnames option which turns it back on, and
3. Silence the warning if --quiet is used.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid