This file contains some historical information on afio.  It also
contains notes about changes in new versions.

============Very old README file contents==============================

Afio is a better way of dealing with cpio-format archives. It is
generally faster than cpio, provides more diverse magnetic tape
options and deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption.

Afio is quite portable. It is now running under 4.2BSD, System V
and even one or two UNIX-like operating systems. Please see the
beginning of afio.c for a brief description of the compile-time
configuration options.

[...]

				Mark Brukhartz
				Lachman Associates, Inc.
				..!{ihnp4, sun}!laidbak!mdb

[...]

=================Notes on changes in new versions==================


Dave Gymer (dpg@cs.nott.ac.uk) (up to version 2.3-dpg-3):

This is my port to Linux of afio.  See afio.1 and README for a
description of what this does.  It's based on work I did to port this
to MiNT by Eric Smith on the Atari ST, and consists mainly of bugfixes
and one important new feature; the use of st_rdev to indicate whether
a regular file was compressed by afio or not if it's name in the
archive ends in .z.  I did this because I didn't want backups of files
which were already compressed (like .tar.Z archives and some of the
stuff in the Xfree386-1.1 distribution) to be uncompressed if I
restored my filesystem.

This also means that the -Z option is meaningful when listing the
contents of an archive; if given, any .z files are listed without the
.z if afio compressed them, or with the .z if they were like that when
afio found them.

I also ran the code through GNU Indent 1.4.

This is the third release of my version; this one knows about gzipped
files (.z), uses gzip instead of compress, and handles other files
which rarely compress well, like JPEGs.

You may want to undefine LONGZFILE if you still use the Minix fs; I
use xiafs so it doesn't matter.  Even if you do use the Minix fs,
you'll only get bitten if you try to restore a compressed archive
without uncompressing files.

Andrew Stevens (as@prg.oxford.ac.uk) (version 2.3-dpg-4 onwards)

I've tidied the code a little to make the double-buffering work (and
prompt sensibly) and avoid leakage of file-handles in the compression
code.

This code really really needs splitting up into multiple source files!

I have tested backing up and restoring off floppies fairly thoroughly
(various options), but I have no the faintest idea how reliable any of
the other stuff is.  

I have included my favourite backup script as an example of the usage
of afio. [This script is in the script1 subdirectory.]
This uses the directory /usr/adm/dump to record dumping
dates and a file /usr/adm/dump/DONTDUMP (example included) to
filter out non-dumpable areas.

The afio source as given will not attempt to compress files ending in
  .Z .z .gz 
  .arc .gif .zip .zoo .lha .jpeg .jpg 
  .tpz .taz .tgz .tzg 
See also the -E option in the manual page.


Koen Holtman (koen@hep.caltech.edu) (version 2.3.5 (for Linux) onwards)

Introduced new options -E, -G, -M, -w and -W.

On compressing files, afio now temporarily stores the result in memory
in stead of creating (potentially huge) /tmp files.  This way, there
is no danger of the /tmp filesystem getting full during a backup, so
that a backup script calling afio can safely use /tmp.  Afio won't use
more than 2 meg memory for temporary storage (also see the -M option).
If it runs out of memory, it calls gzip twice, the first time to
determine the length of the result, the second time to get the data
itself.

The -y and -Y options now are able to handle real shell patterns, and
generally work more sensible.
Verifying floppy disks now works on Linux.


Version 2.3.6 (for Linux):

Added -T option.  The options -G and -T can be used to optimize the
backup speed/compression ratio if you have a slow machine or a fast
backup medium.  Added -S option.  Fixed some bugs in 2.3.5.


Version 2.3.6-dpg-1 (for Linux):

Bug fix in -F option by Dave Gymer (dpg@Cs.Nott.AC.UK).


Version 2.3.7:

Deleted shared memory code to reduce code clutter.  

Removed `buggy gzip workaround' in compfile.c, this caused afio to
hang occasionally if the -f option was used.  This means that afio will
only run with newer gzip versions. (I don't know exactly which version
is new enough, though gzip 1.2.3 and above certainly are. Just try
it.)

Edited -F code to fix `double prompting' bug.

Added more warnings to the manual.

Added some ifdefs and a few notes to make porting to other unix
versions easier.


Version 2.4:

Added -r option and small bugfix in tty handling, both by Anders
Baekgaard (ab@osiris.cpk.auc.dk).

Added -B option that prints the byte position of each file in the
archive in the -v output.

Made -F option do writing in O_SYNC mode under Linux.  Thus afio will
notice some floppy disk write errors using Linux kernel 1.1.54 or
higher.

Updated manual page.  Updated usage message.

Made version number shorter, though number of changes does not warrant
a new major version.


Version 2.4.1:

Fixed bug that sometimes caused unzipping to fail due to a seek on a
pipe (bug found and fixed by Keith Owens).

Deleted malloc() result check in meminit() to help porting, malloc(0)
returns NULL on some machines.

Fixed bug caused by incorrect assumptions about write(), triggered
under Linux if afio -iZ ... is stopped and restarted.

Now exits if a broken pipe occurs on the stderr of afio -i or the
stdout of afio -t and afio -rv.  Thus afio -t can be used with head to
get a table of contents of the beginning of an archive.

Fixed bug in setting suid/sgid bits when restoring a file that does
not have user=root, group=root.  Afio did not take into account that
the Linux chown() clears these bits in some cases.

Expanded semantics of -s, changed the behavior when afio gets an input
eof without there being an -s option given; the old behavior can be
gotten back by using -s 0.  This change prevents bogus insert next
disk messages when the archive ends prematurely.

Made control file feature (added -D option).

Fixed bug in afio 2.4 that caused symbolic link info to be omitted
when creating an archive.

Fixed bugs in -r option.

Removed empty lines from logfile created with -L option, also fixed
bug in logfile creation.

Reorganized documentation files, updated manual page.


Version 2.4.2:

Added code to let subprocesses close archive file descriptor, needed
for some tape drivers when changing tapes.

Fixed bug in multivolume tape read code.

Added some portabilty stuff:
- Rewrote archive header scanf to be more portable.
- Changed CPPFLAGS into CFLAGS in Makefile.
- Changed ssize_t and size_t in writeall() to int.
- Added code to clear asb.sb_rdev in the file stat block if not a
  device: some OSes put (garbage?) info in this field in stead of
  clearing it and afio wants it cleared.

Added -a option to preserve atime on files read when doing -o or -r.
Using it will set the ctime for these files to the current time, so
this option _cannot_ be used together with most incremental backup
schemes, which rely on the ctime being preserved.

Fixed bug in -f option when used with -s.

Updated manual, added new warning to BUGS section.

Fixed tocentry() to print -B byte offset to stdout instead of stderr.

Added support for creation of UNIX sockets in restore.

Added single qoutes around rsh switches. 

Added `-s 0' functionality to the -I command.

Added -z calculation to -I and -O commands.

Changed restore not to do utime() to restore time on symlinks: the
timestamp change gets done on the file linked to and that is not very
productive.

Took -N flag out of LDOPTS in Makefile.  No idea what it should have
done.

Added `f to format' option in floppy handling code (patch by Ulrich
Lauther).  Note that afio still does not have adequate multivolume
floppy support: use the tbackup program as a wrapper around afio for
that.

Changed default format command in Makefile from /bin/fdformat to
fdformat.

Changed nice(-40) to nice(-10) for subprocess in -f option.

Added options -U, -P, -Q to force compression, specify compression
program and pass options to the compression program, based on patch
file by karsten.ballueder@stud.uni-karlsruhe.de.  Added script3/
directory to distribution.

Version 2.4.3:

Fixed bug in restore code which sometimes prevents an old file from
being overwritten with a hard link.  Based on report by Nokubi
Takatsugu.

Version 2.4.4:

Fixeded more bugs in hard link handling, based on same report by
Nokubi Takatsugu.  The inode field in the archive header only stores
the meast significant 16 bits, which is too little for todays
filesystems, yet the unpacking code assumes that these 16 bit fields
have unique values for each filesystem entry when handling hard links.
This can cause problems when unpacking files with hardlinks.  Added
code to 1) make unpacking od old archives safer by adding more sanitiy
checks and 2) ensure that hardlink processing related inode fields in
newly produced archives are unique by inventing unique inode numbers
if necessary.  Added -4 flag to write `extended ascii' format archives
with 4-byte inode fields, based on code by Nokubi Takatsugu.  See
manpage for caveats about -4.

Incorporated some patches by Rob W. W. Hooft to speed up buffer memory
allocation for -Z option.  Rob reported impressive speedup (due to
less mallocs all the time) for large files in some cases but I have
been unable to duplicate any dramatic speedup myself.

Fixed bug reported by Sebastian Wilhelmi: afio -o now correctly exits
with a fatal error and 1 exit status if there is a write error to the
backup medium.  Added -J flag to revert to something like old
behavior: with -J, media write errors give a warning and writing goes
on, and afio finally exits with status 1.  (Actual old behavior was
printing warning going on and exiting with status 0.  Bad.)

Improved -Z reporting using patch by Ed Casas. Made some additional
improvements too.

Afio will now exit with status 1 if there any warnings were printed
during the operation (but some may be missed if -f is used).

Added a sleep(2) to lower chance of race condition in rsh processing
when reading remote archives with afio ... host:/file.  Problems
reported/investigated by Rob Browning and Dirk Eddelbuettel.  [Note
that, in spite of me correcting problems in it, remote file handling
is still not officially supported by this maintainer -- KH]

Incorporated some patches by Juergen Lock to make porting to (Free)BSD
systems easier.  This should also solve an IRIX porting problem
reported by Mike McDonnell.

Incorporated patch by Timo Korvola to allow specification of an
alternative remote shell program (like ssh) for remote archives.

Added patch by Werner Koch to speficy user for remote file processing.
Full syntax now is `filename_without_:' for local files or
[user@]host[%rsh][=afio]:file for remote files.  (A patch for the same
feature was sent by David Atkinson too.)

Added some DEC Alpha porting patches by George Brizicky.  Incorporated
a Solaris porting patch by Erich Focht.

Added -H (promptscript) option using patch by Alexander Zangerl.

Fixed buggy handling of 0-length files which already have a .z
extension.  Bug reported by Bob Mitchell.

Incorporated patch by Dave Gymer which adds -0 option like GNU cpio,
to allow input filenames to be terminated with a '\0' instead of a
'\n'. When used with find ... -print0, can be used to ensure that any
filename can be handled, even if it contains a newline. (A patch for
the same feature was sent by Rob Browning too.)

Lots of manpage updates, also updated BUGS section of manpage.


Version 2.4.5:

Fixed progress reporting and media change code to handle archives and
archive volumes above 2GB and 4GB correctly, based on patch by Mike
Black.  Problems also reported by Maik Musall.

Added 'g' (gigabytes) as a possible size denotation in options taking
numbers, using patch by Mike Black.

Added @ option based on patch by Mike Black.

Removed bug in 2.4.4 which would report media change messages as
warnings about errors in the final -z count.

Added three extensions (.deb, .rpm, .bz2) to the list of those to be
excluded from compression by default.  Patch by Dirk Eddelbuettel.

Fixed bug in code for restoring archived made with -4 option (oops!).
Bug found by Chris Thompson.

Incorporated patch by Bryan Henderson which fixes bug in floppy
prompting if -f option used (every prompt was issued twice).

Improved -H (promptscript) option using patch by Raphael Manfredi.
Promptscript now has tty on its stdin, and gets one more argument.
Included sample promptscript by Raphael Manfredi.

When writing archive without specifying -s or -s 0, added code to
switch to next volume if current one is full (if write() returns 0
bytes witten or ENOSPC error).  Part of code based on patch by Raphael
Manfredi.

Some updates to documentation.


Version 2.4.6:

Fixed file closing bug in -r option which prevented tape switches when
verifying with some tapes.  Bug reported by Tetsuya Makimura and also
by Alan J. Wylie.

Switched to -Wall in Makefile, modified code to suppress -Wall
warnings (at least with my gcc), based on patch by Holger Schurig.

Added some extensions to the list of those to be excluded from
compression by default.  From patch by Holger Schurig.

In tests and source code checks, no year 2000 (Y2K) problems have been
found with afio.  All afio versions back to at least 2.3.6 should have
no year 2000 problems, nor should existing archives produced with such
versions have year 2000 problems within.  Current afio versions do
have the usual unix second counter underflow problem, which will
manifest itself in 2038.  The date-printing afio options (-tv and -L)
print 4 digit years.  The archive formats output by afio (both ASCII
and extended ASCII) use the usual unix seconds-since-1970 counts to
represent dates, these counts are encoded as octal numbers in a
wide-enough field.

Some non-Linux platforms, Sun in particular have a dev_t larger than
16 bits.  This caused problems archiving devices on these platforms.
We now take this into account: if it is larger than a 16 bit number,
the dev_t value is re-encoded in the dev and ino parts of the header.
The makedev include is also updated to special-case for Sun.  Based on
a bug report by by Guenter Steger.

Fixed bug in interference between -Z and -l options on writing an
archive.  Fixed bug in -U, which would not force compression of hard
linked files.  Documented internal afio limitations connected to -Z on
hard links and -U and hard links.

Added -1 option and revised its default for better backwards
compatibilty with existing backup scripts.  Compatibility problem (tob
never going on to verify phase if afio exited 1) reported by Denis
Sbragion.  (I recall that the problem was also reported by someone
else but can't find the report anymore.)  Same problem, or maybe not,
also reported by Florin B Manolache.

Added -3 option for better compatibility with pgp.  Based on bug
reports by Jens Getreu.  And many thanks to Jens Getreu for testing
the -3 option!  This fixes a security hole:

  --snip--
  [SECURITY] afio: security hole in 'afio -P pgp' encrypted archives

  I. Description
 
  Since version 2.4.2, the afio archiver has had an interface, the '-P
  pgp' command line option, which can be used to pgp-encrypt the file
  data witten to an afio archive.  Following up on some bug reports, I
  have recently discovered a security problem with this afio-pgp
  interface: pgp encryption is not always applied in the right way.
  This makes it possible to crack the encyption on the file data in an
  'encrypted' archive produced using afio with the '-P pgp' option.

  The security of files which were already encrypted _before_ being
  written to the archive is not affected.

  II. Impact

  It is possible to cheaply crack the encryption of at least some of
  the file data in the 'encrypted' archives produced using 'afio -P
  pgp'.  This includes archives produced using the pgp_write example
  script included in the [pre-2.4.6] afio distribution.

  III. Solution

  _Existing archives_ [made with pre-2.4.6 afio versions] produced
  with 'afio -P pgp' should really be treated with the same care
  (against theft etc.) as unencrypted archives.  If such existing
  archives cannot be deleted or safely locked away, then encrypting
  the _entire_ existing archive file with pgp will protect it.

  --snip--

Updated scripts in script3/ to use new -3 option.

Updated manpage, added some afio command line examples.  cdrecord
example contributed by Joachim Bergmeyer.

Added code to make -y -Y -w -W also work when creating archives.
Based on patch by Brian Powell.

Fixed bug in -a option, which would not restore the access time on
files stored with compression when creating an archive.  Based on
patch by David Rourke.

Made some changes to ease portability to the IRIX native C compiler.
See also the PORTING file.  Based on patch file by Brian Gunney.

Afio currently invokes gzip for compression in the -Z option.
Performance experiments by Ted Phelps showed that linking the zlib
compression library and invoking it internally will not lead to big
performance benefits.  Though zlib is faster for very small files, it
turns out that invoking gzip is faster for larger files.  Switching to
zlib would imply a major disturbance in the source.  The small to
negative performance benefits expected do not seem to justify this, so
switching to zlib is not currently considered.

Made some changes to ease portability to HPUX with gcc.  See also the
PORTING file.  Based on patch file by Daniel Andersson.

Enhanced -s option based on patch by Sebastian Weber, it now can
accept a comma-separated list of sizes.

Updated manpage BUGS section to say that afio does not restore
owner/group information on symlinks.  Restoring this info would be
possible using the relatively new `lchown' system call, but that call
is not supported on older linux systems and some other unix systems.
Problem reported by Marko Jahnke.  Further reporting by 
Giuliano P Procida.

Added gnupg_* scripts to script3/ dir.  Scripts by Jens Getreu.

Added script5/ dir and scripts, contributed by Jens Getreu.

Updated existing scripts part of SCRIPTS file.

Updated /script1 and script2/ to improve/remove /tmp file handling.
Based on patches by Marius Tomaschewski.  These changes make the
scripts more resistant to funny security exploit business with
pre-existing /tmp files.

Added code to round down volume size to a multiple of the block size
in the -s option.  Added -9 option to suppress this: pre-2.4.6
versions of afio defaulted to no rounding down.  Rounding down is
needed for compatibility with some devices, notably ftape.  Based on
bug report by L. C. Robinson.

Changed -H promptscript option to take running as an at or cron job
into account.  If /dev/tty is not a connected device, afio will now
connect /dev/null to the stdin of the promptscript.  Based on bug
report by Andreas Wehler.


Version 2.4.7:


Fixed bug that sometimes caused `-- compressed' to be printed twice in
verify operation.  Has to do with not flushing stdout, stderr before
forking.  Bug reported by JP Vossen.

Added more material on how pattern matching works in the -y option
section of the manpage, and added examples of selective restores to
manpage.  Based on questions by Kjell Palmius and Stojan Rancic.

Added text to BUGS section about afio not being able to write into
directories for which it has no write permissions, except when running
as root.  Problem reported by Kagan Kayal.

Fixed bug that caused afio -s option values above 4gb to be sometimes
treated as a much lower value when reading an archive.  This was a
truncation-in-casting bug triggered by some combinations of -b and -s
values.  Bug reported by Michael Zieger.

Looked into the case of reading/writing archives to/from regular
filesystem files which are bigger than 2 GB.  Seem to work on newer
linux systems supporting such large files.  On the recent linux system
I tried (Red Hat 6.2, kernel 2.4.2, GCC 2.95.3, libc.so.6 ->
libc-2.1.3.so) a freshly compiled afio can read and write >2GB archive
files to the filesystem.  HOWEVER I also got reports from others with
_the same_ or _newer_ versions of stuff that their compiled afio is
not able to do this.  I have not found a pattern to this: your best
bet is to recompile the afio executable on your platform and try.
Based on reports by Grzegorz Wieczorek and Norbert Veber.

Looked into the case of >=2GB files being included *in* an archive.
With pre-2.4.7 afio versions under Linux, two cases of breakage
apply. 1) if afio was compiled without large filesystem support then
such files generated "Value too large for defined data type" error,
however WITHOUT causing nonzero exit (unless -1 option made `missing
files' a cause for nonzero exit). 2) if afio was compiled with large
filesysten support such files would be archived.  However, such files
could then not be verified, listed or unpacked correctly because the
afio archive header does not have enough room to correctly represent a
>=2GB file size.  [Note: If you really really need to restore such a
file: by doing some hacks and hand-holding the restore it should be
possible to achieve this -- all the data is in the archive, afio just
does not know after how many extra increments of 2GB (or 4GB?)  blocks
it ends].  Added following bugfixes to address all this.  No matter
how it is compiled under Linux, afio will now issue a warning when
encountering a >=2GB file in the set to archive, and not archive that
file. The warning will cause nonzero exit (unless -1 option changes
this).  Also documented 2GB limitations in manpage.  Based on bug
reports by Mike Black.


Fixed bug that mis-calculated compression ratio number (XX%) printed
by afio -o -v when compressing very large files.  Bug found by Koen
Holtman.

Did more work on hard links to soft links (some installs actually make
these things! Sheesh!)  Afio -t output is improved for these, and afio
-r does not give incorrect verify errors anymore on veryfiying the
second, third, etc. link.  Afio -i now correctly restores hardlinked
soft links (at least on the linux kernel I tested it on).  Updated
manpage to change earlier statement that "Some Linux kernels allow one
to create a hard link to a symbolic link.  afio cannot handle such
hard links correctly.".  Based on bug report by Thomas Dorner.  Should
also be cleaner fix to problem reported earlier by Giuliano P Procida.

If a fatal error occurs and data was transferred, afio makes sure to
print an error message which includes the offset of the fatal error.
Based on bug report by Francesco Potorti.

Fixed typesetting bug in afio manpage that caused -R option
description to exclude the `Disk format command string' argument.
Based on a 1998 bug report by Lee Bradshaw, and thanks to Dirk
Eddelbuettel for prompting me to look over the Debian bug report
database for for afio again -- looks like I lost track of it when I
got the report the first time.

Added -2 option -- this also means changing the default behavior for
compressing very large files.

Updated maintainer e-mail addresses.

Added some more documentation on sparse file handling to the manpage.

Documented some -r option limitations in BUGS section of manpage.

Added maximum name length check on reading file names from stdin with
afio -i.


Version 2.4.7.9beta:

[This is a BETA release, meaning that I (the maintainer) am applying 
less strict quality control than I would do for a normal release.
The main reason for the BETA is to get >2GB functionality out to
people who need it now and are willing to take some extra risk.]

Changes incorporated via Debian 2.4.7-7 (Debian packaging releases
maintained by Dirk Eddelbuettel).

Corrected typo in manpage, cdrecord was spelled crdrecord. Based on
report by Christoph Claus.

Switched to large file compile environment (-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE) in order write archives larger than 2GB.  Based
on suggestions by Norbert Veber.

Applied patch by Dieter Schuster to correct an endian issue on 32-bit
powerpc systems, trigged by having 64 bit off_t.  The bug was in the
sprintf formatting in outhead(), asb->sb_size should be (unsigned long
int) asb->sb_size.

Applied patches by Stephen van Egmond to correct endian issues on 32-bit
powerpc systems and fix all -Wall issues.

Lots of little changes and fixes of fixes based on the above.  Based
on discussions and tests with/from Stephen van Egmond, Dirk
Eddelbuettel, Dieter Schuster, Complete history of fixing not
documented here.  Historians, see Debian bug DB numbers #144986 and
#153948, and maybe more bug numbers too.

Put very elaborate warning flags in compiler options -- need
to take out later.

[End of list of changes incorporated via Debian 2.4.7-7.]

Improved type used for the variable pad in outeof()

Removed linkp and some use of it in incheckentry().  This was a bug
(dormant?) introduced by maintenance in 2.4.7.  Based on reports by
several people, including at least Matthias Stolte, Stephen van
Egmond, Devin Reade, and Mike Black.

Added large ASCII header support for 2G files and 32bit inodes, uid,
gid, dev, rdev, and nlink values, as well as 64 bit mtime values (be
prepared for if time_t goes higher than 2038).  Based on patch from
Clark Rawlins.

Changed inode type in large ascii header to 64 bits.

Added extra space (2 bytes) for flags to second extended ascii header,
and variable-length extra header (with 2-byte length indicator).  All
set to 0 in this release.

Updated and improved discussion of archive portability in manpage.

Changed installation locations for `make install' to be compatible
(I think) with the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.


Version 2.4.7.9beta4:

Fixed bug in defines: ushort was defined twice

Updated regression test scripts some more.  Changed >2gb regression
test to use 4.1 gb file: that way we actually use more than 32 bits in
the file size.

Updated README.FIRST file based on various regression test results.

Made ascii art in .h file to decode large ASCII header.  Put a few
ascii chars in the large ascii header to make it easier to read.

Added a lot of casting refinements based on study of elaborate
compiler warnings.


Version 2.4.7.9beta5:

Improved makesparse code in regression test.

Version 2.4.8beta1:

Added -6 option based on suggestions from, discussions with, and patch
from Matthias Stolte.  

Extended -E option syntax.  Created new mechanism to create -E default
extensions list from the manpage, because I keep updating it.  Added
more extensions based on suggestions by Kevin Cosgrove and Matthias
Stolte.  Made default -E extension matching case-insensitive, and
added case sensitiveness configurability to the -E option, based on
suggestion by Kevin Cosgrove.

Added discussion of using bzip2 to the manpage, prompted by question
from Nick Papadonis.

Improved the documentation of the -Z option in the manpage.

Fixed (largely theoretical) bug in nameaddfile().

Improved description of -A option (and defaults if no -A used) on the
manpage.  Based on a problem report by Matthew Vernon.

Fixed bug in verify command: if the file in the archive is not
compressed, and the file on the filesystem has grown larger than the
file on the archive, this was not detected before.  Based on bug
reporting and analysis by Ryan W. Maple and Rainer Koenig, and patch
by Ryan W. Maple.

Added pointer to the HISTORY file in the authors section of the
manpage.

Added section on web site and internet resources to manpage.

Made some internal buffers used during compression and verify larger.

Fixed bug in verify code: verifying a compressed or uncompresses file
has a logic bug in that it assumed that the read(f,b,s) system calls
would always return with s bytes if not end of file/stream yet.  This
assumption is incorrect, especially when reading data from a
pipe. (Strange that this bug never seemed to cause real problems until
I did some testing with a large sparse file and `cat' as the
compression program)

Removed limitation (introduced in one of the 2.4.7.beta versions) in
the -2 option that for files bigger than 2GB, compression is never
attempted, unless the -U flag says so.  This limitation was introduced
at the time because of concerns that gzip would not work on >2GB
files.  Some testing showed that gzip works fine (and bzip2 also).

Added code to use lchown call, so that owner information on symlinks
is restored (if the OS does nor have a lchown call, the HAVE_LCHOWN
symbol can be commented out in the Makefile).  Based on patch file
from Matthias Goebl.

Added -vv option, and documented stderr/stdout behavior of -v option
better.  Based on patch file from Matthias Goebl.

Added code to set the correct modification times on directories that
are restored, even if these directories have additional files restored
into them.  (In older versions, the mtime was set when creating the
directory, but then usually the filesystem updates that mtime to the
current time when the directory is filled.  Now, the original mtimes
of restored directories are remembered, and they are set again just
before afio exits.)  Based on patch file from Matthias Goebl.

Added a sanity check on the stdin at the start of executing -o mode.
Output file is only opened (and, if existing, truncated to 0 length)
when the stdin data starts looking like a file list.  This should
prevent deletion of the archive file contents in most cases when
people who want to do afio -i myarchive accidentally type afio -o
myarchive.  The idea is that people who type afio -o accidentally will
see the error messages and press ctrl-C in time.

Documented archive format in the manpage, and improved documentation
of the -k option.  Also included a hint about the -k option in the
unrecognisable archive error messages.  Based on problem reports by 
Evren Yurtesen and Carter Alvord.  

Added example of splitting archive into 1GB parts to overcome 2GB
filesystem limitations.  Based on question by Bob Stewart.

Updated maintainer e-mail addresses again.  Updated README,
INSTALLATION files.

Documented archive portability problem in handling major/minor numbers
across different OS versions in BUGS section.

Fixed bugs in hard link handling when creating an archive (when
running without -4 option).  (I did some tests on this code with 130K
files with hard links, and it turns out that the old code was not
correct, though it usually does do the right think when archiving
moderate numbers of hard linked files.)  The code in linkto()
for creating unique 16-bit inode numbers for files with hard links in
the archive was buggy.  The code would definately fail to produce a
correct archive when packing more than 4096 sets of hard linked files
in the archive, and could also fail in some cases when 4096 had not
been reached. The impact of this bug is somewhat low, I never got any
bug reports about it, so I guess that most people who have lots of
hard links and care about restoring them correctly were using -4
already.  (The -4 option did not suffer from these bugs, and did
correctly handle many hard links as advertised.)

Added code so that, if number of archived hard links goes over 64K,
then large archive headers will be used to store any additional hard
linked files. This maximises cpio (and afio backwards) compatibility,
while removing the 64K hard link restriction for the normal invocation
of afio.  Updated manpage accordingly.

Fixed bug in *un*packing of archives created with -4 option: hard
linked files these archives would not always be unpacked correctly
(with afio not printing any error messages about things being
incorrect) if the -4 flag was ommitted on the command line when using
afio -i.

Added printing of warning message for the case `archive will not be
fully compatible with cpio or afio versions 2.4.7 and lower', and c
and C letters for -1 option.  Based in part on discussions with Mike
Black.

Added code for handling uid/gid values >64K, by using large ASCII
header.  Based on problem report by Jeffrey Eugene Crawford.

Added code for handling time_t values >2^31.  Not that Linux supports
these yet...

Added n letter to -1 flag, based on patch by Keith G. Murphy.

Documented use of additional arguments to generic prompt script in -H
flag, based on suggestion by Lance Albin.

Updated usage message that is printed when afio is run without
command line arguments or with invalid arguments.

Added M letter to -1 option.  Based on suggestion by Devin Reade.

Version 2.5:

In afio.h ulo and ull macros, added L and LL letters in constants.
This is more correct and portable and fixes compiler warnings on newer
gcc versions.

Documented `long long' issues in PORTING file.  Removed ifdeffed
typedef ulonglong porting hacks from the afio.h file.

Changed mknod() call to mkfifo() call when creating named pipe from
archive.  Freebsd cannot make named pipes with mknod.

Added some extra defines to suppress some warnings on sun platform.
Also added some stuff around awk invocations in makefile and regtest
to make things easier on sun -- the sun platform I tried it on had a
default awk that was too ancient to understand things like gsub.

Added some discussion of sun and freebsd to PORTING file.

Fix to regression test: no longer complains if two compared directory
inodes have a size difference.  Bases on bug report by vasudeva.

Changed sanity check on the stdin at the start of executing -o mode:
now the check only happens if stdin is a tty.  This allows scripts to
make empty archives, and is needed for compatibility with tob.  Based
on problem report by Dirk Eddelbuettel.

Changed read() to readall() in outdata().

Updated SCRIPTS file.


Version 2.5.1:

(This version folds in all non-debian specific bug fixes and feature
extensions, with respect to 2.5, that were made in the Debian afio
package 2.5-6)

(This version does not incorporate fixes for all bug reports or
feature requests I got since afio 2.5: some of these remain on the
todo list)

Fixed a file descriptor handling bug that caused gzip subprocess to
keep running when afio -oZ is killed or crashes.  Based on bug report
and patch by Alain Spineux.

Fixed bug that could cause afio -oZ to hang, and/or write faulty data
without warning, if a large file was modified while being written.
The bug fix prevents hanging, and introduces warnings when faulty data
might be written.  Based on bug report and patch by Alain Spineux.

Improved error reporting in -r operation, based on discussions with
Alain Spineux. Note that the error message text is all changed now,
to be more verbose and explanatory, so scripts that grep the message
text have to be rewritten.  Verfication reporting via exit code 0/1 is
unchanged, unless the -1 r flag is used.

Added -1 r flag to ignore certain warnings when verifying the backup
of a live filesystem.  Based on discussions with Alain Spineux.

Changed 'diff -u0' into 'diff -U 0' in regtest.do script in order to
be compatible with command line argument parsing of newer gnu diff
versions.  Also added sort commands to sort find output because when
order changes with respect to order in which files where created, this
gives false fail on the hardlink check part of regression test. Based
on problem reports by Dallas Legan, Shlomi Levi.

Added defines to compile under CYGWIN based on patches by Dirk
Eddelbuettel and Jari Aalto.

Fixed bug in test script, that triggered when find(1) listed files in
a different order than the order in which afio unpacked then into the
directory.  This bug cause the test script to report failure even
though there was no failure. Bug reported by Andre Francois, also by
Fred Wright and Bruce Bowler.

Fixed bugs in test script, having to do with 'bash -c' and 'source'
not being ablre to find the dircomp and dircompare commands, that were
reported openSuse 10.3 and 11.4.  (I have been unable to reproduce the
bugs in my environment, so I hope the fixes work.)  Bugs reported and
fixes proposed by Fred Wright.

Added .ogg as an extensions to the list of those to be excluded from
compression by default.  Proposed by Dirk Eddelbuettel.

Fixed logic in in() to correctly report failure with a warning message
when uncompression of a commpressed-archived file fails.  Also fixes
that, potentially valid archive data would be skipped after this
error.  Based on bug report by Daniel Webb.

In next(), changed msg to variable-length string, to avoid possible
buffer overflow.  Part of the patch by Erik Schanze (downstream Debian).

Extended -0 option to influence -t processing and -w and -W file
reading too. The -0 option now toggles when used multiple times.
Added -7 option to disable/enable globbing in processing -yYwW
filename patterns.  Based on feature request and patch by Christian
Schrader (via Debian).  Note that the semantics of the -7 command line
options is sligtly different than it was in the Debian 2.5-3 to 2.5-6
branches: in those branches, -7 was non-toggling so it was not
necessary to supply the -7 before any -yYwW options it should
affect. 

Replaced several 0 by NULL to avoid compiler warnings. Based on patch
by Erik Schanze (downstream Debian).

Replaced sys_errlist usage by strerror(3).  This avoids (on some
systems) compiler warnings about sys_errlist being obsolete.  Left in
the old code (with #if 0) to ease porting.  Based on patch by Erik
Schanze (downstream Debian) and report by Mike Black.

Fixed bug in gpg usage examples in script3/, and removed script5/
which had the same bug.  Bug reported, and bug fix found, by Marcus
Williams.  Also added info on this to the manpage. In the earlier
scripts, the built-in compression feature of gpg was used, but it
turns out that this cannot be reliably used with afio: it should be
disabled using the -z 0 option to gpg.  The reason why gpg built-in
compression cannot be used is as follows. When compression is used,
and gpg is run twice on the same input file, it can generate differing
outputs with different lengths.  This is a problem for afio if the
output length is larger than the afio -M option value.  If the length
is larger than the -M value, then afio will call the 'compression'
program twice, once to get the 'compressed' file length and once to
get the actual file contents and write them to the archive, and if the
lenght is bigger in the second run then the data in the archive will
be truncated (and therefore corrupted).  Afio does emit an error
message when this happens, but it might be overlooked.  Some caveats:
in testing it looks like if -z 0 is used with gpg, it will never
produce different-length files for the same input, but I can not find
anything in the documentation of gpg suggesting that this is a
guaranteed feature.  pgp (the non-GNU implementation) might has a
similar different-length behavior causing afio to fail occasionally,
but I have found no reports on the web about this.  (An alternative
would be to use openssl as the encryption engine??)

Updated legal information for redistributers about the afio license in
afio.c and in the .lsm files.  Removed earlier text concluding that by
Linux Software Map standards, the correct afio license label was LGPL.
Added the text file afio_license_issues_v5.txt.  All of this was
triggerd by a blog entry writen by Tom Callaway, and informed in part
by further discussion in the blog comment section and on some Debian
mailing lists. Thanks to Mark Brukhartz for going on record to clarify
the intent of the original license text.

Increase default size for -M option from 2 to 250 megabytes.