It seems that Gentoo ships star-1.5.3 which is 5 years old and meanwhile, a lot of new code has been added and a lof of problems have been fixed. Short overview for what changed since the last "stable" version: - Support for "infinitely" long path names has been added. - Support for comparing timestamps with nanosecond granularity - -secure-links has been made the default when extracting archived (except when doing an incremental restore). - Added Support for NFSv4 ACLs on FreeBSD. Solaris has been supported since 2013. BTW: Are there plans to add the standard NFSv4 ACLs to Linux? - Added Support to archive SELinix attributes. - Allow to configure whether "star -fsync" is the default in order to support filesystems that are slow with granted transactions (like ZFS) or platforms that are genrally slow with fsync() (like Linux). - Full UNICODE support has been added for tar headers. - Support for -zstd compression has been added. - Some rare FIFO problems have been fixed. Note that we did recently run more than a billion tests to verify the FIFO after we identified a method to trigger the problem on Linux. Since many platforms today are interested in installing shared libraries instead of linking statically against project specific libs, it is recommended to use schilytools as the source since this is the only way to get all libraries in a consistent up-to date state. BTW: There are other intreresting programs in schilytools that seem to miss on Gentoo, like e.g. the POSIX certified SunPro Make implementation, SCCS, ...
I suppose you will give us a URL for the tarballs next?
OK, the download URL has been added three years ago and your version is older. http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/ The current version is schily-2019-02-18 updates are typically bi-weekly.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 672060 ***
