version 1.27.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-11-17

* Bug fixes

* Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.

* Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).

* Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.

version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05

* Bug fixes

** Sparse files with large data

When creating a PAX-format archive, tar no longer arbitrarily restricts
the size of the representation of a sparse file to be less than 8 GiB.

* Quoting

In the default C locale, diagnostics and output of 'tar' have been
adjusted to quote 'like this' (with apostrophes) instead of `like this'
(with an accent grave character and an apostrophe).  This tracks
recent changes to the GNU coding standards.

* --owner and --group names and numbers

The --owner and --group options now accept operands of the form
NAME:NUM, so that you can specify both symbolic name and numeric ID
for owner and group.  In these options, NAME no longer needs to be
present in the current host's user and group databases.

* The --keep-old-files and --skip-old-files options.

This release restores the traditional functionality of the
--keep-old-files.  This option causes tar to avoid replacing
existing files while extracting and to treat such files as errors.
Tar will emit a prominent error message upon encountering such files
and will exit with code 2 when finished extracting the archive.

A new option --skip-old-files is introduced, which acts exactly as
--keep-old-files, except that it does not treat existing files as
errors.  Instead it just silently skips them.  An additional level of
verbosity can be obtained by using the option --warning=existing-file
together with this option.

* Support for POSIX ACLs, extended attributes and SELinux context.

Starting with this version tar is able to store, extract and list
extended file attributes, POSIX.1e ACLs and SELinux context.  This is
controlled by the command line options --xattrs, --acls and --selinux,
correspondingly.  Each of these options has a `--no-' counterpart
(e.g. --no-xattrs), which disables the corresponding feature.
Additionally, the options --xattrs-include and --xattrs-exclude allow
you to selectively control for which files to store (or extract) the
extended attributes.

* Passing command line arguments to external commands.

Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
command line as well.  Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
arguments to invoked programs.  The affected options are:

  --checkpoint-action=exec
  -I, --use-compress-program
  -F, --info-script
  --to-command

Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
the command line itself.  Care should be taken to escape them, to
prevent from being expanded too early, for example:

  tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'

* New configure option --enable-gcc-warnings, intended for debugging.

* New warning control option --warning=[no-]record-size

On extraction, this option controls whether to display actual record
size, if it differs from the default.

* New command line option --keep-directory-symlink

By default, if trying to extract a directory from the archive,
tar discovers that the corresponding file name already exists and is a
symbolic link, it first unlinks the entry, and then extracts the directory.

This option disables this behavior and instructs tar to follow
symlinks to directories when extracting from the archive.

It is mainly intended to provide compatibility with the Slackware
installation scripts.