gobject-introspection fails to install on 10.14 18A326h due to tar error

[rben01 (Robert)]

port install gobject-introspection fails due to an issue with tar. This issue persists after a clean reinstall of MacPorts and also if MacPorts is configured with --with-tar=gnutar and --with-gnutar=gnutar, so it's not specifically an issue with macOS's /usr/bin/tar. Logs below.

[rben01 (Robert)]

port install gobject-introspection error logs

[kencu (Ken)]

You're going to soon be asked not to discuss pre-release software on MacPorts.

However -- I notice homebrew does discuss such things, and in doing so, when a new MacOS version comes out, a number of things have already been fixed prior to the roll-out, whereas we scramble to catch up.

It seems like there _should_ be some way to work through these MacPorts things on these beta MacOS versions, somehow, somewhere...

[rben01 (Robert)]

Yes, I did consider the dilemma, but figured it would be better for MacPorts if these issues could be sorted out before the official release. Obviously this issue is low priority, at least until the official release starts getting close.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

The Milestone field is for use by Macports team members only, please do not set it.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

Likely something to do with the fact that the tarball contains both gi-GITypelib.html and gi-gitypelib.html in docs/reference/html. MacPorts isn't doing anything unusual here, and I'm guessing your tar would also fail to extract this tarball when run manually. So you should report this regression to Apple.

[rben01 (Robert)]

Since most Macs, on any macOS version, are on a case insensitive file system, I don't see how this could ever work. Also, this failed with a separately installed version of tar (specifically, conda-forge's tar from ​https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/tar).

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

​http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/multiple.html#SEC61

If multiple tar implementations have the same issue on this OS, that's all the more reason to report the bug to Apple.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to rben01:

Since most Macs, on any macOS version, are on a case insensitive file system, I don't see how this could ever work.

Previously, I think what we observed is that when extracting, later files in the archive would overwrite earlier files in the archive. Apparently it's no longer willing to do that now.

I'd also recommend reporting the problem to the developers of gobject-introspection. They should not distribute archives that require a case-sensitive filesystem to be extracted.

[ttww (Thomas Welsch)]

Hi,

I had the same problem. Nothing helps, tried some permissions, "different" TARs (bsdtar, tar) compiled from sources leads to the same problem... After reading the reason (case-insensitive file system ( thanks apple :-( ) and some "ugly" tar files), I where able compile everything with that trick:

1. Create an empty disc image: hdiutil create -size 4g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -volname build /Users/XXXX/build.sparsebundle
2. Mount the disk image: hdiutil attach /Users/XXXX/build.sparsebundle -mount required -owners off
3. Copy the content of /opt/local/var/macports to /Volumes/build/macports
4. Remove the /Volumes/build/macports
5. Symlink with ln -s /Volumes/build/macports /opt/local/var/macports

I had some problems with the permissions and ACL, at the end I did everything as root and that works (even create the image...)

Anyway, now I have my ImageMagick back :-)

[rben01 (Robert)]

So is this not a Mojave issue at all? Is it just case insensitive file systems? I’d only attempted installing this package on Mojave so I’d assumed that that was the issue. Can anyone confirm whether it’s worked on past versions of macOS in case insensitive file systems?

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

Yes it works on released macOS versions.

[AP1010]

This seems to be a general problem in Mojave. Not specific to any particular port. I saw it with AquaTerm. The following example works in High Sierra, but fails in Mojave beta 4:

1. Create two tar archives. One containing a file named 'file', the second one containing a file named 'File'
2. Extract first archive to empty directory
3. Try extracting the second one into the same directory.
4. it fails with "Can't unlink already-existing object"

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

Yes, this is not a MacPorts bug and you should report bugs in prerelease Apple software to Apple.

[markemer (Mark Anderson)]

Thomas's workaround works the best for now. But we should make sure we all open radars against this.

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Build of latest gobject-introspection 1.58.0 builds without error on 10.14 buildbot. If you're still having problems see above comments for work arounds.