Bug 913406

Well actually tar does store the big (In reply to comment #0)
> Steps to reproduce problem from $Summary:
>
>   # useradd -u 160000000 biguid

There should be  ^^^^^^ 16777216 of course..

>   # su biguid
>   $ cd /tmp
>   $ touch testfile
>   $ tar --posix -cf test.tar testfile
>   tar: value 16777216 out of uid_t range 0..2097151
>   tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
>   $ echo $?
>   2
>
> Subject:
> GNU tar is unable to store UID into posix format when UID > 2^21

Well, the problem is quite smaller than it could look like.  GNU tar is able to
store UID/GID to the file-related record archive - but when it tries to store
extended headers in a special record in tarball, tar fails to set owner of
that record.  By default, this does just throws error code 2 but the file is
created OK.

> After quick looking at the problem, this seems to be temporary regression in
> latest released version of GNU tar fixed this by the commit:
>
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/
> ?id=df7b55a8f6354e30e8da62eec7f706df033d0c81

These comments are just to better track the issue in Fedora:

I looked at older releases and even in tar 1.15 this problem existed (I haven't
tried older releases).

Mentioned upstream commit fixes this problem by setting the owner of extended
header record to '0' (root) hardly.  This should not make problems because if
the unpacking tar implementation is aware of xattrs (e.g.), information about
owner is trashed.  If there is tar implementation not aware of xattrs, the
special record is unpacked as a special file - during this phase the info about
user must not be used anyway as the source UIDs/GIDs may not exist on target
system.  So when user wants to unpack it with incompatible tar - it is possible.

The pax specification says that gid/uid are not meaningful:

  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904875/utilities/pax.html#tag_04_100_13_02

So in general there shouldn't be a problem.

====

As for Fedora - I'll extract the part

--- a/src/create.c
+++ b/src/create.c
@@ -514,8 +514,8 @@ start_private_header (const char *name, size_t size, time_t t)
 
   TIME_TO_CHARS (t, header->header.mtime);
   MODE_TO_CHARS (S_IFREG|S_IRUSR|S_IWUSR|S_IRGRP|S_IROTH, header->header.mode);
-  UID_TO_CHARS (getuid (), header->header.uid);
-  GID_TO_CHARS (getgid (), header->header.gid);
+  UID_TO_CHARS (0, header->header.uid);
+  GID_TO_CHARS (0, header->header.gid);
   MAJOR_TO_CHARS (0, header->header.devmajor);
   MINOR_TO_CHARS (0, header->header.devminor);
   strncpy (header->header.magic, TMAGIC, TMAGLEN);

.. and push to rawhide.

Pavel

Commit:
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=fc99fb3b0ade2ca6af4d7070edde750f7746aaa6

tar-1.26-12.fc18 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 18.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/tar-1.26-12.fc18

tar-1.26-12.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.