I've just upgraded my MBP to Leopard. Apple's version of tar has
the annoying habit of generating extra files to represent Mac specific
attributes. That's particularly annoying for CPAN authors because they tend to
break your test suite and you can't easily see them without unpacking
the archive on a non-Mac system. Grrr.
It used to be possible to disable this behaviour by setting the env var
COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE to some true value - but this seems
to have stopped working in Leopard. As a result I've just released
a broken version of
Captcha::reCAPTCHA. Double Grrr.
strings /usr/bin/tar fails to reveal anything promising, /usr/bin/gnutar is just a hard link to /usr/bin/tar and I can't get the MacPorts gnutar to build so for now
I've restored a copy of Tiger's tar from a backup and dumped it in ~/bin (which I have
on my path). Phew.
Watch out Mac-based module authors - it's hard to detect that you have a broken archive without testing it on a non-Mac machine.
