I am not a member of this mailing list, so I will copy and paste the comment of Philip Guenther here:
"The 'cpio' format for pax (selected using "-x cpio") handles long file names in a portable way, as opposed to GNU tar's non-portable extension for handling file names longer than 100 bytes." Agreed, GNU tar has some serious problems managing long filenames (and not so long filenames, a short filename on a complex directory hierarchy is all required to break it.) I worked on a fix to gtar in 1998 (we called it "adjusting gtar to the POSIX 1003.1 (ustar) standard). There were very annoying problems sharing data between PCs with Linux, our HP-UX servers and Solaris workstations at that time. At that time, it was only required extracting the contents of some Solaris patches on a Linux machine to see what this problem means. Sadly, this patch is only applied to gtar releases when the maintainer of this application is Frangois Pinard. In this case, gtar is compatible with pax(1) on most operating systems. I am certainly against a patch that breaks the excellent compatibility between pax(1), cpio(1) and tar(1) on OpenBSD and these tools on other platforms. If gtar is incompatible... well... it is the decision of the maintainers of gtar, the patch is available. On the other hand, this problem happens when the filenames (including both the dirname and basename) are larger than one hundred characters. You mention a different issue, filenames larger than 255 characters. I am sure there is something that can be done to avoid so large filenames, like educating Windows users to choose better filenames. Cheers, Igor.
