Good morning,
GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) uses GNU Autotools. A Gnuastro
developer encountered the "Numeric user ID too large" error when
generating a tarball with the 'make dist' command on his macOS (Monterey
12.3) laptop. His user id is an integer with 9 digits, which is too big
for the old v7 and ustar formats of tar.
The issue is discussed in Gnuastro's bug tracker
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65578), where the work-around conclusion
was to use a conditional that adds 'tar-pax' to 'AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE' when
the user ID is so large. For reference, here is Gnuastro's configure.ac:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuastro.git/tree/configure.ac#n44
The issue was also erroneusly reported in autoconf's bug tracker
(https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?111123).
Even though we encountered this problem in macOS, this problem may not
be limited to it. Other user management systems who use such large IDs
may also cause this issue.
While it is possible to write such workaround downstream in Gnuastro, it
would be nice to have the issue solved upstream in the GNU Autotools
since it can happen for any other developer of other software that uses
Autotools.
Best Regards,
Giacomo Lorenzetti
