Jim Meyering wrote:
Perhaps we should
try harder to find a tar-creating program that has options to do the
above, and simply abort when it is not found.
For creating tarballs, I think it'd be enough to simply specify the options on
the command line. Traditional 'tar' will reject them (with "tar: =: unknown
function modifier") and will fail. By and large, only developers want to create
tarballs, and it's OK to ask them to use development-quality tools.
I did propose an Automake patch, here:
http://bugs.gnu.org/20132
This patch misspells "automake" as "autoconf"; I'll fix that before it goes in.
It's just a quality-of-implementation issue, as unpatched Automake will work OK
with bleeding-edge gzip. The main upside of the patch is that even with
bleeding-edge gzip Automake would by default generate .gz tarballs no larger
than the tarballs generated by unpatched Automake with older gzip.
