Concerning my mails related to strange behaviour of the release tarballs: There is an incompatibility between gnu tar and other tars as well as different versions of gnu tar whenever the name of a file (including path) is exactly 100 chars long. POSIX allows exactly 100 chars without using extension mechanisms, newer gnu tars seem to use their own extension algorithm already starting with length 100.
All files with strange behaviour in the release tarballs had path+file name exactly 100 chars long and the last char was chopped off whenever the extracting tar was not compatible (even gnu tar) with the building tar.
