On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 12:29 AM, Tom Lane <
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> My Salesforce colleague Thomas Fanghaenel observed that the TAP tests
> for pg_basebackup fail when run in a sufficiently deeply-nested directory
> tree. The cause appears to be that we rely on standard "tar" format
> to represent the symlink for a tablespace, and POSIX tar format has a
> hard-wired restriction of 99 bytes in a symlink's expansion.
>
> What do we want to do about this? I think a minimum expectation would be
> for pg_basebackup to notice and complain when it's trying to create an
> unworkably long symlink entry, but it would be far better if we found a
> way to cope instead.
One way to cope with such a situation could be that during backup we create
a backup symlink file which contains listing of symlinks and then archive
recovery recreates it. Basically this is the solution (patch), I have proposed