+version 1.26.90 (Git)
+
+* 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 when 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.
+
+\f
+version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12
+
+* Bugfixes
+
+** Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
+
+** Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
+
+** Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace
+
+tar --atime-preserve=replace no longer tries to restore atime of
+zero-sized files.
+
+** Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64
+
+** Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental
+
+When invoked with these two options, tar 1.25 would add only the
+top-level directory to the archive, but not its contents.
+
+\f
+version 1.25 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-11-07
+
+* Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect.
+* Fix extraction of device nodes.
+* Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation.
+
+Tar 1.24 changed the ordering of name matching and name transformation
+so that the former saw already transformed file names. This made it
+impossible to match file names in certain cases. It is fixed now.
+
+* Fix the behavior of tar -x --overwrite on hosts lacking O_NOFOLLOW.
+
+* Improve the testsuite.
+
+* Alternative decompression programs.
+
+If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
+compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
+are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
+
+ 1. Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
+ compression format.
+ 2. The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
+ line by the use of such options as -z, -j, etc.
+
+For example, if 'compress' is not available, tar will try 'gzip'.
+
+\f
+version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
+
+* The --full-time option.
+
+New command line option '--full-time' instructs tar to output file
+time stamps to the full resolution.
+
+* Bugfixes.
+
+** More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
+
+Tar now checks for inconsistencies caused when a file system is
+modified while tar is creating an archive. In the new approach, tar
+maintains a cache of file descriptors to directories, so it uses more
+file descriptors than before, but it adjusts to system limits on
+the number of file descriptors. Tar also takes more care when
+a file system is modified while tar is extracting from an archive.
+
+The new checks are implemented via the openat and related calls
+standardized by POSIX.1-2008. On an older system where these calls do
+not exist or do not return useful results, tar emulates the calls at
+some cost in efficiency and reliability.
+
+** Symbolic link attributes
+
+When extracting symbolic links, tar now restores attributes such as
+last-modified time and link permissions, if the operating system
+supports this. For example, recent versions of the Linux kernel
+support setting times on symlinks, and some BSD kernels also support
+symlink permissions.
+
+** --dereference consistency
+
+The --dereference (-h) option now applies to files that are copied
+into or out of archives, independently of other options. For example,
+if F is a symbolic link and archive.tar contains a regular-file member
+also named F, "tar --overwrite -x -f archive.tar F" now overwrites F
+itself, rather than the file that F points to. (To overwrite the file
+that F points to, add the --dereference (-h) option.) Formerly,
+--dereference was intended to apply only when using the -c option, but
+the implementation was not consistent.
+
+Also, the --dereference option no longer affects accesses to other
+files, such as archives and time stamp files. Symbolic links to these
+files are always followed. Previously, the links were usually but not
+always followed.
+
+** Spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe.
+
+When receiving SIGPIPE, tar would exit with error status and
+"write error" diagnostics. In particular, this occurred if
+invoked as in the example below:
+
+ tar tf archive.tar | head -n 1
+
+** --remove-files
+
+'tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
+symlinks to another files within that directory.
+
+** --test-label behavior
+
+In case of a mismatch, 'tar --test-label LABEL' exits with code 1,
+not 2 as it did in previous versions.
+
+The '--verbose' option used with '--test-label' provides additional
+diagnostics.
+
+Several volume labels may be specified in a command line, e.g.:
+
+ tar --test-label -f archive 'My volume' 'New volume' 'Test volume'
+
+In this case, tar exits with code 0 if any one of the arguments
+matches the actual volume label.
+
+** --label used with --update
+
+The '--label' option can be used with '--update' to prevent accidental
+update of an archive:
+
+ tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
+
+This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
+
+** --record-size and --tape-length (-L) options
+
+Usual size suffixes are allowed for these options. For example,
+-L10k stands for a 10 kilobyte tape length.
+
+** Fix dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the -k option.
+
+\f
+version 1.23 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-03-10