This is GNU tar. This is a *pre-release* version, and not ready for production use yet. Please send comments and problem reports to . If you have taken the sources from CVS you will need the following packages (or later) to build GNU tar. We don't make any extra effort to accommodate older versions of these packages. If we discover that newer versions are needed to bootstrap, we'll update the version numbers in this list. autoconf 2.59 automake 1.8 bison 1.875 gettext 0.12.1 m4 1.4 wget 1.7 For GNU m4 1.4, we recommend also installing the `translit' patch; see Debian bug 211477 . This patch is bundled into Debian m4 1.4-17 or later. Before building the package, run "bootstrap". It obtains various additional files from the CVS repository and the Translation Project site and prepares the source directory for building. When run without arguments, bootstrap will try to obtain gnulib and paxutils files from their corresponding CVS repositories on Savannah using anonymous SSH access. Then, it will fetch the po files from tar page at Translation Project, and, finally, it will start autoconfiguration process. Simply running it without arguments should do in most cases. Several options allow to control the behavior of bootstrap: --gnulib-srcdir=DIRNAME Specify the local directory where gnulib sources reside. Use this if you already have gnulib sources on your machine, and do not want to waste your bandwidth dowloading them again. --paxutils-srcdir=DIRNAME Specify the local directory where paxutils sources reside. Use this if you already have paxutils sources on your machine, and do not want to waste your bandwidth dowloading them again. --cvs-auth=METHOD Set the CVS access method used for downloading gnulib files. METHOD is one of the keywords accepted by cvs -d option (see info cvs repository). --cvs-user=USERNAME Set the CVS username to be used when accessing the gnulib repository. --no-po Do not download po files. Notice also that when using CVS authentication method "ext", bootstrap will set the variable CVS_RSH to "ssh", unless it is already set to some other value. Copyright (C) 2001, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of GNU tar. GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with tar; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.