bug#80987: automake: Please do not leak maintainer information in the dist tarball by default with gnutar

    when using GNU tar, --format is being used, I think it would make
    sense in that case to also pass --owner=0 and --group=0, 

Thanks for the suggestion.  Maybe so, though I don't like the idea of
the tarball contents being different depending on the tar program used.

Passing another option to _AM_PROG_TAR doesn't look especially fun, but
certainly doable. I don't think 0/0 should be used unconditionally.

    I guess in the gnutar case in m4/tar.m4.

Yes, it's in tar.m4. Called from (note to self :) m4/init.m4. --best, karl.