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Working in tar sources is not always pleasurable. The problem is
that tar sources are very fragile. Just cleaning around breaks
things. The current sequence of prereleases is for slowly trying
to solidify it, so tar becomes more maintainable. I think that
the ugliness of sources could be corrected to a certain extent, too.
A few efforts to replace GNU tar have been done already and it
seems that all failed so far. A toy program, for me, is another kind
of failure. I think people underestimate the number of portability
problems such a program can raise. This is not only a matter of
programming style, there is really a wide variability in systems
out there. GNU tar has a long history, met a rich variety
of porting problems, machine peculiarities, system idiosyncrasies,
which are unrelated to programming style. My own opinion is that we
cannot dismiss all the experience gleaned along the years, and saved
(if not hidden) in GNU tar sources, pretending to start anew,
from scratch.
Even if a new program replacing GNU tar would be marvelous, GNU
tar stalled for a few years waiting for such a program, and we
are now faced to nothing, with hundreds of user reports to catch on.
We need a working archiver now, and cannot live on promises.
Any new program will take hundreds of user reports, and many years,
to stabilize enough to become a plausible tar replacement.
I rather plan to clean up GNU tar. This alone is a big task for
me, because GNU tar coding is not ideal, and I have to find ways
to transform it slowly, while having it fully working at all times.
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