Unfamiliar files in tarball

[Shun-ichi GOTO]

The tarball trac-0.10.5.tar.gz seems to contain some unfamiliar files
like "._ChangeLog". I guess they are Mac OS related files.
Are they required to distribute?

There are 7 files:
$ find . -name '._*'
./._ChangeLog
./._RELEASE
./trac/._Search.py
./trac/.___init__.py
./trac/scripts/tests/._admin-tests.txt
./trac/ticket/._model.py
./wiki-default/._WikiStart

--
Shun-ichi GOTO

[Jonas Borgström]

Shun-ichi GOTO wrote:
>
> The tarball trac-0.10.5.tar.gz seems to contain some unfamiliar files
> like "._ChangeLog". I guess they are Mac OS related files.
> Are they required to distribute?

No you can safely ignore them.

They are created by my text editor textmate since I forgot to disable
the textmate extended attributes feature on my new laptop. These
attributes are apparently stored as separate files in zip files.

http://manual.macromates.com/en/saving_files#extended_attributes_metadat
a

/ Jonas

[Emmanuel Blot]

>> The tarball trac-0.10.5.tar.gz seems to contain some unfamiliar files
>> like "._ChangeLog". I guess they are Mac OS related files.
>> Are they required to distribute?

These come from a "feature" from Apple: they provide a GNU TAR tool
that packs meta data into an archive w/o informing the archive
creator, so if you are not very careful when you create a tar ball,
you may end up packing up some "personal" data in your tar ball file.

It seems they (Apple) did not even consider to add an option in tar to
opt-out this IMHO stupid feature, or even better, an opt-in option.
This "feature" is not even properly documented.

Meanwhile, there is a handy but not so well documented environment
variable to tell the Apple GNU TAR to behave as a regular GNU TAR:

export COPYFILE_DISABLE=1

This is for Leopard. There is an equivalent variable for Tiger, but I
can't remember the name.

Cheers,
Manu