Unable to decompress .tar.xz/.txz files with -J option

[bortis]

Binary package hint: tar

According the GNU tar webpage tar 1.22 should be able to decompress lzma archives in a xz container. I have installed tar 1.22 on karmic but was unable to decompress some slackware *.txz packages I had downloaded, with the -J option.

Use cases:

Creating tar.xz file from the command line in Karmic with tar 1.22:

# tar cfvJ test.tar.xz Music
tar: xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Music/

Extracting a tar.xz file in Karmic with tar 1.22:
#wget http://mirror.yandex.ru/slackware/slackware64-current/source/kde/src/kdeadmin-4.2.4.tar.xz
#tar xvJf kdeadmin-4.2.4.tar.xz
tar: xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

[Marco Segreto (msmarc)]

Additional information may be needed to confirm this bug :
- Your version of Ubuntu
- What actions you took to produce the bug
- Were you able to reproduce the bug?
- What were the results of the bug? Any Error messages?

[Anthony Fok (foka)]

Hi there,

Judging from your error log:

    # tar cfvJ test.tar.xz Music
    tar: xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory

Perhaps you simply didn't install "xz" itself?
Please make sure you include the Karmic universe
repository, and then:

    apt-get install xz-utils

or download the package from:

    http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/xz-utils

Hope this helps,

Anthony

[Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek (mgol)]

@Anthony Fok

Ubuntu marks it as potentially dangerous as it requires removal of lzma used by dpkg:

$ sudo apt-get install xz-utils
[sudo] password for mgol:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  lzma
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  xz-utils
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  lzma (due to dpkg)
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 166kB of archives.
After this operation, 209kB of additional disk space will be used.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
 ?]

[bortis (bortis)]

Hi folks,

The lzma-utils which the lzma tool in karmic is based on, is no longer under development. All the work is now going into xz-utils. xz-utils has also a binary called lzma which will do exactly the same. So I can't understand why ubuntu is not including xz-utils in main, since tar is requiring it for all the xz compressed packages that are all over the internet now.

http://tukaani.org/xz/

[onny (onny)]

Bug seems still to be present in Ubuntu 10.04. I'm not able to install xz-utils :(