Can't extract release tarball

[talismanick]

I downloaded the v2.2 tarball, to try manually building it before using it in an xbps-src template. (it's akin to a PKGBUILD for pacman)

No matter what flags I pass to tar, it returns some variant of "tar: This does not look like a tar archive".

scientifica.tar works fine, but as xbps would install it to /usr/share/fonts, I'd like to build it myself. (per xbps conventions for building font packages)

[oppiliappan]

Hmm strange, does tar xzf scientifica.tar.gz not work?

As a side note, I attempted to package scientifica and curie for void linux a couple years ago, and it got promptly rejected because it did not meet the "standards" required by a package.

[talismanick]

Hmm strange, does tar xzf scientifica.tar.gz not work?

It unfortunately does not, for neither the 2.2 nor 2.3 tarball.

As a side note, ...

This was for personal use. (to keep a clean build environment and to auto-remove all files in case I decided to uninstall)

On another note, how are you building the tarballs?

[oppiliappan]

On another note, how are you building the tarballs?

I am using tar cf scientifica.tar scientifica/, and I am running tar v1.34:

$ tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.34

Are you looking to build ttfs/otbs from source? Or just download them directly from the releases? In the first case, could you maybe download and unpack the tagged tarball?

Currently releases are zipped manually by me, I run nix build followed by that above tar command to archive the build artifacts. I hope this info helps.

[trunc88]

I had a similar issue trying to extract scientifica.tar from release 2.3 using busybox tar. It gives me a permissions error:

$ busybox tar xf ../scientifica.tar
tar: can't open 'scientifica/otb/scientifica.otb': Permission denied

bsdtar x from libarchive successfully extracted it, and a ls -l reveals that there is no write permission on the internal directories or files of scientifica.tar:

$ ls -ld scientifica
drwxr-xr-x    5 ---      ---             39 Oct  1 12:24 scientifica
$ ls -l scientifica/ scientifica/*
scientifica/:
total 0
dr-xr-xr-x    2 ---      ---             94 Oct  1 12:24 bdf
dr-xr-xr-x    2 ---      ---             85 Oct  1 12:24 otb
dr-xr-xr-x    2 ---      ---             85 Oct  1 12:24 ttf

scientifica/bdf:
total 328
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---         113637 Oct  1 12:24 scientifica-11.bdf
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---         102486 Oct  1 12:24 scientificaBold-11.bdf
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---         112490 Oct  1 12:24 scientificaItalic-11.bdf

scientifica/otb:
total 80
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---          26784 Oct  1 12:24 scientifica.otb
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---          24272 Oct  1 12:24 scientificaBold.otb
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---          26636 Oct  1 12:24 scientificaItalic.otb

scientifica/ttf:
total 348
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---         120736 Oct  1 12:24 scientifica.ttf
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---         108444 Oct  1 12:24 scientificaBold.ttf
-r--r--r--    1 ---      ---         122064 Oct  1 12:24 scientificaItalic.ttf

I don't have GNU tar installed, so can't test that. Unsure if this is related or not. The 2.2 and 2.3 tagged source tarballs both extracted fine for me with either busybox tar or bsdtar.

Unrelated: with respect to:

scientifica.tar works fine, but as xbps would install it to /usr/share/fonts, I'd like to build it myself.

scientifica.tar just contains the font files. You should be able to create a template to install them wherever you want. I used Void for a while but never packaged anything for it so my apologies if I'm wrong, but I can't imagine their build system would be so inflexible.

Really great font by the way! Not many monospaced bitmap fonts with italics out there it seems.