star (http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/star.html) should become the standard tar on Gentoo. GNU tar has lots of known bugs and it's just ugly (moreover, the project seems dead ...). No one is able to maintain GNU tar right because it's an ugly hack, not beiing POSIX compliant and not even generating correct tar archives by default. star does all this better and has ACL support additionally ... On my system, I use /bin/tar as a symlink to /usr/bin/star as an hack to replace GNU tar, and everything work very well !
How do you deal with the -bz vs -j issue? I'm working first on updating and stability testing star. We'll go from there.
form the man page : -bz run the input or output through a bzip2 pipe - see option -z below. As both the -bz and the -z option are non standard, it makes sense to omit the -bz and the -z inside shell scripts if you are going to extract a compressed archive that is located inside a plain file as star will auto detect compression and choose the right decompression option to extract. I think we can add -j and --bzip2 (and maybe -I) as alias to -bz option to be compatible with GNUtar and send a patch to the upstream maintainer. This should be a little change in a getargs call.
Well I got a hardcore negative on this from other members of the development team. This will at least for now not be officially supported under gentoo, I am going to approach the star maintainer about working toward a more compatible interface such that we can at some time in the future create a virtual tar and get the speed and standards compliance benefits of star.
