This bug was reported via Debian bug system by Mike Ashton <email address hidden>:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=658239
pbzip2, when run as root, does not preserve the user and group ownership of the source file on the newly created .bz2 file if the source file is zero length.
This is inconsistent with its behaviour in lenny, but worse it is inconsistent with bzip2 itself for which it should be a drop in replacement.
This may seem trivial (it's a weird edge case, I'll grant you), but it just broke a lot of cron jobs following a dist-upgrade :)
wilson:~# : >test1
wilson:~# : >test2
wilson:~# chown mike test?
wilson:~# pbzip2 test1
wilson:~# bzip2 test2
wilson:~# ls -l test?.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14 Feb 1 11:19 test1.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 mike root 14 Feb 1 11:18 test2.bz2
I just commited a patch on my private branch (lp:~yavor-nikolov/pbzip2/bug-1011021-owner-not-prezerved-on-0-files). I'll merge it into a new release soon.