Those who have been following the theads on http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/gump/latest/ know that I am very concerned about version to version compatibiliy issues.
A longFile attribute will be introduced in 1.3. Meanwhile this change makes it difficult to produce build.xml files which work on both 1.2 and 1.3. Specifically, projects like xerces and xalan which didn't know that they were broken before are in fact broken now. Looking into the implementation of the tar task, what I'd recommend is that the check for length of names be done within the tar task itself. When a long name is encountered, the options are to skip, warn, or error; with the default being to warn (log) and proceed to encode using using GNU. I'm willing to do the work, and am even willing to do it only in the 1.4 branch if the timing is not right for this type of change in 1.3. Thoughts? - Sam Ruby
