[Insight-users] Installing ITK on Unix

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Janeth,


     What operating system are you using ?


  This looks like the common problem with the
  broken tar tool that is distributed with SUN.

  If you are using a SUN workstation, you may
  want to make sure that you are invoking the
  GNU tar, instead of the broken tar tool of
  Solaris.


  See for example:
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/insight-users/2004-May/008564.html


  and
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_mono/tar.html#SEC128


<Quote>

8.1.7 Checksumming Problems

SunOS and HP-UX tar fail to accept archives created using GNU tar and
containing non-ASCII file names, that is, file names having characters
with the eight bit set, because they use signed checksums, while GNU tar
uses unsigned checksums while creating archives, as per POSIX standards.
On reading, GNU tar computes both checksums and accept any. It is
somewhat worrying that a lot of people may go around doing backup of
their files using faulty (or at least non-standard) software, not
learning about it until it's time to restore their missing files with an
incompatible file extractor, or vice versa.

GNU tar compute checksums both ways, and accept any on read, so GNU tar
can read Sun tapes even with their wrong checksums. GNU tar produces the
standard checksum, however, raising incompatibilities with Sun. That is
to say, GNU tar has not been modified to produce incorrect archives to
be read by buggy tar's. I've been told that more recent Sun tar now read
standard archives, so maybe Sun did a similar patch, after all?

The story seems to be that when Sun first imported tar sources on their
system, they recompiled it without realizing that the checksums were
computed differently, because of a change in the default signing of
char's in their compiler. So they started computing checksums wrongly.
When they later realized their mistake, they merely decided to stay
compatible with it, and with themselves afterwards. Presumably, but I do
not really know, HP-UX has chosen that their tar archives to be
compatible with Sun's. The current standards do not favor Sun tar
format. In any case, it now falls on the shoulders of SunOS and HP-UX
users to get a tar able to read the good archives they receive.

</Quote>




    Regards,


      Luis


-----------------------------------
janethb at calmail.berkeley.edu wrote:
>  Hello,
>     I am having difficulty downloading and installing ITK.
>     Here are my steps:
>   Downloaded InsightToolkit-2.4.1.tar.gz
>   Using gunzip, the file InsightToolkit-2.4.1.tar was created
>   Using “tar xvf” I opened the tar file
>   I get the error “tar: directory checksum error”  so that ITK will not 
> compile with ccmake
>     Please let me know what I might be doing wrong.
>     thanks for your help!
>     Janet
> 
>  ---------------------------------
>  UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering
> 
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