Issue #6123: Fix opening empty archives and files.
(Note that an empty archive is not the same as an empty file. An
empty archive contains no members and is correctly terminated with an
EOF block full of zeros. An empty file contains no data at all.)
The problem was that although tarfile was able to create empty
archives, it failed to open them raising a ReadError. On the other
hand, tarfile opened empty files without error in most read modes and
presented them as empty archives. (However, some modes still raised
errors: "r|gz" raised ReadError, but "r:gz" worked, "r:bz2" even
raised EOFError.)
In order to get a more fine-grained control over the various internal
error conditions I now split up the HeaderError exception into a
number of meaningful sub-exceptions. This makes it easier in the
TarFile.next() method to react to the different conditions in the
correct way.
The visible change in its behaviour now is that tarfile will open
empty archives correctly and raise ReadError consistently for empty
files.
3 files changed