Problem brewing w/tar?

[Linda Walsh]

Seems more recent versions of tars include various extensions that
can confuse older versions of tar. I wasn't even aware that my gnu
tar defaulted to POSIX 2002 headers (pax) until someone told
me their build used ARCHIVE::TAR, that doesn't understand them.

Problem has been temporarily glossed over by adding flags to my build
process
( dist => { TARFLAGS=> 'c --format=v7 -f' },)
but this bothers me -- alot! Since if someone else tries a make
tardist -- it will fail if their tar doesn't understand those flags.

So it looks like that might not be a very good solution.

Ideas... How can I specify a tar that will work for others that
will work for others if they build?

FWIW -- I first encountered this when *my* tar (gnu) complained
about "star" (schelly) headers in a CPAN file... I reported it as a minor
bug .. HA, talk about instant karma... But I'm not seeing a great solution.

Too bad Archive::Tar isn't up-to-date with a 10+year old standard.

Maybe it should be dropped from new distros?