tar 1.15 released

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the release of GNU tar 1.15.

GNU tar is an archiver that creates and handles file archives in various
formats. You can use tar to create file archives, to extract files from
previously created archives, store additional files, or update or list
files which were already stored.

The program saves many files together into a single tape or disk
archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. It
includes multivolume support, the ability to archive sparse files,
automatic archive compression/decompression, remote archives and
special features that allow 'tar' to be used for incremental and full
backups.

For more information on tar, including links to file downloads,
please see the tar web page: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar
and the the project page http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar.  

GNU tar is available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar and
the mirror sites worldwide (see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
for the list of those).

The MD5 checksums of the files are:

ccfa915461a74f6912227411da7ea3ea  tar-1.15.shar.gz
412695e2c2ecbe2753d128f303b3ccf4  tar-1.15.tar.bz2
92264bf53887cacdf8594e92886c8d28  tar-1.15.tar.gz

User-visible changes in this release:

* Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer
necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can
now run `tar tf archive.tar.gz'.

* When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option
prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
from being purged.

With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create
incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they
would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the
back up. This change fixes the bug.

* Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
the GNU convention.

* Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports
seeks.

* Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.

* `tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of
the file names had their prefixes stripped off.

* New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories
automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those
containing a standardized tag file, as specified at:

        http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html   

* New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to
the `rmt' utility. This supercedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable
introduced in version 1.14

* New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory
where to install `rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying
--libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it
also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if
--enable-backup-scripts was given).

* Bugfixes:

** Fixed bug in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps.
** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option.
** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters.
Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames.
** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice,
previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they
were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and
lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first
extracted copy in such cases.
** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which
didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect).
** Fixed verification of created archives. 
** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous
versions failed to recognize \a and \v).
** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous
versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.

Regards,
Sergey