Can't extract latest civicrm-4.7.22-drupal.tar.gz to install

Question

Trying to upgrade civicrm for drupal to 4.7.22 on a linux machine. I've tried downloading the file from both the civicrm.org site and sourcefourge. Get the following error when extracting:

tar -xzf civicrm-4.7.22-drupal.tar.gz

tar: civicrm/vendor/pear/net_smtp/README.rst: Cannot create symlink to `docs/guide.txt': No such file or directory tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

I then extracted using 7-zip on a windows 10 machine, hoping to ftp the folder up directly, but not all the folders are there.

The sourceforge extracted civicrm folder is different from the one I downloaded from the civicrm site (using beyond compare). I'm not confident installing either one.

Answer 1

I tested those two downloads, and found:

• The two tar.gz files are identical (MD5=26e2db3c52d105659acc293cc2ffc74c for civicrm-4.7.22-drupal.tar.gz)
• Yes, there's an invalid symlink in the file.

That "bad" symlink might offend some tools (and might trigger anti-virus warnings) but it's harmless and should not affect the CiviCRM files you've downloaded. It links a README in one of our packages from that package's docs dir to the package root, and we strip that docs folder out of the code we ship.

I have opened an issue (CRM-20884) & submitted a small fix (PR10676) to resolve that missing symlink in some upcoming release.

Thanks for raising this! You did the right thing to question what you were seeing. FWIW, I recommend downloading from https://civicrm.org/download in favour of SourceForge.

Answer 2

This file also causes an error in Drupal Backup and Migrate. Deleting the link solved the problem but it will likely recur if future upgrades include the link, I presume