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GNU does not necessarily support non-UNIX systems, that is to say, MSDOS is not supported. It is very true that ports can sometimes be very intrusive in the sources, cluttering them significantly with conditionals and extra code, and distract GNU maintainers from the main development line.
However, a special argument might be made for tar.
Both tar and gzip are the required tools for getting
something out of the GNU archives, tar should be more opened
to ports than the GNU rule states. Jean-loup did a tremendous job at
porting gzip on smaller systems. It would be comfortable that
a few other GNU tools be available on MSDOS and others, among which
tar. These ports for tar have theoretically no priority
at all. Nevertheless, a port is interesting, because tar is
so central in GNU distributions, and gzip is already ported.
Some porting efforts have been done in the past. There are traces of
a few exchanges on this subject in `BACKLOG'. GNU tar
sources have been modified a lot recently at a cosmetic level, and
I would certainly have a hard time integrating diffs provided by
someone else. If people want porting tar to MSDOS or other
non-UNIX systems, they should be committed in supporting their ports
after the fact, as I cannot do it myself.
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