Strange tar error with --format=ustar: value 4294967295 out of gid_t range 0..2097151

[Judy Anderson <JAnderson at rocketsoftware dot com>]

I need to send a collection of files to a Z/OS machine from a windows machine.  When we were on Windows 2000, we just used "pax".  But apparently Microsoft has discontinued pax in Win2003.  So we searched for a solution.  Cygwin tar SAID it would produce pax format files, but the Z/OS machine doesn't like them if they contain long file names.  However, tar will ALSO produce ustar format, and pax on the mainframe is able to read those.  So we were cooking with gas.

Except on my usual development machine, where I get the error:

E:\yduJ> c:\cygwin\bin\tar cf foo.tar --format=ustar foo
/usr/bin/tar: value 4294967295 out of gid_t range 0..2097151
/usr/bin/tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

It works FINE on the official build machine, just not MINE.  So I reran Cygwin setup and reinstalled and rebooted.  No help.  I started making all sorts of wrong guesses about this.  Eventually I discovered a directory on my machine which DID tar up.  Then I realized what was different:  I had made or edited at least one file USING EMACS in all the other directories.  Yep, added a file using emacs and the new directory couldn't be tarred either.

I went and got emacs version 23.1.1 from gnu hoping it would be better, but it's not.  Tar is version 1.21.

I figured out a workaround, which is to say --group=1 to specify groups, so I'm OK now, but it would be nice not to need that, since it's only for my development machine.  The build machine of course works only on the cvs checked out files and does not require this workaround.

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