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Why maintaining it?

I confess that I am a little afraid of tar maintainance. It is difficult for many reasons, the first tree being more evident than the others:

• the algorithmic design was initially oriented for machines having very small memory, it was later much adapted for new features without doing everything necessary for the whole to stay clean;

• the wide visibility of tar forces many stunts at portability;

• GNU tar has to be sensitive to file systems and device variance.

• GNU central has been seduced by some users promising to write wonderful tar replacements, which never came, so development has been put aside for years, while bug reports accumulated;

• the tar manual has been withdrawn, promising users a fine replacement for it, so raising their expectations;

• maintenance was once split between four maintainers (one for tar, one for mt, another for scripts, and a team for documentation), and also, `rtapelib.[ch]' from tar is used in cpio, and synchronisation has not always been easy.

However, even if difficult, I do feel like doing a careful cleanup, so tar would become less painful to maintain after a while (and less subject to criticism). And besides, I'm surrounded by a marvelous team of pretesters and by many other collaborating users, which I should learn to serve better. Getting more experience with maintainance in GNU, I hope being careful enough modifying tar so not hurting users too much, being aware that tar is a sensitive product in GNU. Once cleaned up, I might be happy to return tar maintainance to someone else...

tar requires more work alone that all my other things together, and I have to resist being swallowed whole in it. This resistance makes tar development somewhat slower. Sorry!

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