Can't open a compressed TIFF file with compression for update

[maphew@…]

GDAL 1.1.8.0, released 2002/12/21 (NT binary from VTP distribution)

I get the error message:
"ERROR 1: somefile.tif:Can't open a compressed TIFF file with compression for
update"

with the commandline: 
"gdal_translate -of gtiff -co "COMPRESS=PACKBITS" input.tif output.tif"

There is nothing apparently wrong with the output image and it is compressed.

[warmerdam]

This is a problem in libtiff, and has been corrected in libtiff CVS. 
Also, the version of libtiff kept with GDAL (in CVS) now includes the fix.

Basically libtiff was not allowing applications to open compressed files
in update mode, which make it impossible for GDAL to add overviews to
compressed TIFF files.  In the case of gdal_translate this doesn't matter,
but the lower level API is expected to return a writable handle after creating
the file and was unable to do so.