+version 1.27.90 (Git)
+
+* New checkpoint action: totals
+
+The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the
+total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
+
+* Extended checkpoint format specification.
+
+New conversion specifiers are implemented. Some of them take
+optional arguments, supplied in curly braces between the percent
+sign and the specifier letter.
+
+ %d - Number of seconds since tar started.
+ %{r,w,d}T - I/O totals; optional arguments supply prefixes
+ to be used before number of bytes read, written and
+ deleted, correspondingly.
+ %{FMT}t - Current local time using FMT as strftime(3) format.
+ If {FMT} is omitted, use %c.
+ %{N}* - Pad output with spaces to the Nth column, or to the
+ current screen width, if {N} is not given.
+ %c - A shortcut for "%{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}t: %ds, %{read,wrote}T%*\r"
+
+* New option --one-top-level
+
+The option --one-top-level tells tar to extract all files into a
+subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard
+compression suffixes recognizable by --auto-compress). When used with
+an argument, as in --one-top-level=DIR, the files are extracted into the
+supplied DIRectory. This ensures that no archive members are
+extracted outside of the specified directory, even if the archive is
+crafted so as to put them elsewhere.
+
+* New option --sort
+
+The --sort=ORDER option instructs tar to sort directory entries
+according to ORDER. It takes effect when creating archives.
+Available ORDERs are: none (the default), name and inode. The
+latter may be absent, if the underlying system does not provide
+the necessary information.
+
+Using --sort=name ensures the member ordering in the created archive
+is uniform and reproducible. Using --sort=inode reduces the number
+of disk seeks made when creating the archive and thus can considerably
+speed up archivation.
+
+* New exclusion options
+
+ --exclude-ignore=FILE Before dumping a directory check if it
+ contains FILE, and if so read exclude
+ patterns for this directory from FILE.
+ --exclude-ignore-recursive=FILE
+ Same as above, but the exclusion patterns
+ read from FILE remain in effect for any
+ subdirectory, recursively.
+ --exclude-vcs-ignores Read exclude tags from VCS ignore files,
+ where such files exist. Supported VCS's
+ are: CVS, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.
+
+
+* Manpages
+
+This release includes official tar(1) and rmt(8) manpages.
+Distribution maintainers are kindly asked to use these instead of the
+home-made pages they provided so far.
+
+\f
+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.
+
+\f
+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.
+
+\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
+
+* Record size autodetection
+
+When listing or extracting archives, the actual record size is
+reported only if the archive is read from a device (as opposed
+to regular files and pipes).
+
+* Seekable archives
+
+When a read-only operation (e.g. --list or --extract) is requested
+on a regular file, tar attemtps to speed up accesses by using lseek.
+
+* New command line option '--warning'
+
+The '--warning' command line option allows to suppress or enable
+particular warning messages during 'tar' run. It takes a single
+argument (a 'keyword'), identifying the class of warning messages
+to affect. If the argument is prefixed with 'no-', such warning
+messages are suppressed. For example,
+
+ tar --warning=no-alone-zero-block -x -f archive
+
+suppresses the output of "A lone zero block" diagnostics, which is
+normally issued if 'archive' ends with a single block of zeros.
+
+See Tar Manual, section 3.9 "Controlling Warning Messages", for a
+detailed discussion.
+
+* New command line option '--level'
+
+The '--level=N' option sets the incremental dump level N. It
+is valid when used in conjunction with the -c and --listed-incremental
+options. So far the only meaningful value for N is 0. The
+'--level=0' option forces creating the level 0 dump, by truncating
+the snapshot file if it exists.
+
+* Files removed during incremental dumps
+
+If a file or directory is removed while incremental dump is
+in progress, tar exact actions depend on whether this file
+was explicitly listed in the command line, or was found
+during file system scan.
+
+If the file was explicitly listed in the command line, tar
+issues error message and exits with the code 2, meaning
+fatal error.
+
+Otherwise, if the file was found during the file system scan,
+tar issues a warning, saying "File removed before we read it",
+and sets exit code to 1, which means "some files differ".
+If the --warning=no-file-removed option is given, no warning
+is issued and exit code remains 0.
+
+* Modification times of PAX extended headers.
+
+Modification times in ustar header blocks of extended headers
+are set to mtimes of the corresponding archive members. This
+can be overridden by the
+
+ --pax-opion='exthdr.mtime=STRING'
+
+command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
+the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
+
+Modification times in ustar header blocks of global extended
+headers are set to the time when tar was invoked.
+
+This can be overridden by the
+
+ --pax-opion='globexthdr.mtime=STRING'
+
+command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
+the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
+
+* Time references in --pax-option argument.
+
+Any value from the --pax-option argument that is enclosed in a pair
+of curly braces represents a time reference. The string between the
+braces is understood either as a textual time representation, as described in
+chapter 7, "Date input formats", of the Tar manual, or as a name of
+an existing file, starting with '/' or '.'. In the latter
+case, it is replaced with the modification time of that file.
+
+* Environment of --to-command script.
+
+The environment passed to the --to-command script is extended with
+the following variables:
+
+ TAR_VERSION GNU tar version number
+ TAR_ARCHIVE The name of the archive
+ TAR_VOLUME Ordinal number of the volume
+ TAR_FORMAT Format of the archive
+ TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR Current blocking factor
+
+* Bugfixes
+** Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform.
+** Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files.
+** Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199).
+** Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories.
+** The --remove-files option removes files only if they were
+succesfully stored in the archive.
+** Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format.
+** Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar
+format).
+** Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624).
+
+\f
+version 1.22 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2009-03-05
+
+* Support for xz compression
+
+Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
+
+ 1. The option --xz or -J (see below) is used.
+ 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
+ 3. The file name of the archive being created ends in '.xz' and
+ auto-compress option (-a) is used.
+
+Xz is used for decompression if one of the following conditions is met:
+
+ 1. The option --xz or -J is used.
+ 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
+ 3. The file is recognized as xz compressed stream data.
+
+* Short option -J reassigned as a short equivalent of --xz
+
+* New option -I
+
+The -I option is assigned as a short equivalent for
+--use-compress-program.
+
+* The --no-recursive option works in incremental mode.
+
+\f
+version 1.21 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-12-27
+
+* New short option -J
+
+A shortcut for --lzma.
+
+* New option --lzop
+
+* New option --no-auto-compress
+
+Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
+
+* New option --no-null
+
+Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
+
+* Compressed format recognition
+
+If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls
+back to using archive suffix to determine it.
+
+* VCS support.
+
+Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
+Mercurial and Darcs.
+
+* Transformation scope flags
+
+Name transformation expressions understand additional flags that
+control type of archive members affected by them. The flags are:
+
+ - r
+ Apply transformation to regular archive members.
+
+ - s
+ Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
+
+ - h
+ Apply transformation to hard link targets.
+
+Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
+'H' means "do not apply transformation to hard link targets".
+
+The scope flags are listed in the third part of an 's' expression,
+e.g.:
+
+ tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
+
+Default is 'rsh', which means that transformations are applied to
+both regular archive members and to the targets of symbolic and hard
+links. If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
+can be changed using 'flags=' statement before the expressions, e.g.:
+
+ tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|S'
+
+* Bugfixes
+
+** The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
+is fixed.
+** Fixed record size autodetection. If the detected record size differs from
+the expected value (either default one, or the one set from the
+command line), tar always prints a warning if verbosity level is set
+to 1 or greater, i.e. if either -t or -v option is given.
+
+\f
+
+version 1.20 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-04-14