Re: Future possibility to publish _AM_PROG_TAR for general use?

On Sun, Nov 23, 2025, at 4:31 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
> I'm interested in whether publishing _AM_PROG_TAR in tar.m4 
>
> Well, I agree with Bob that _AM_PROG_TAR is rather idiosyncratic, what
> with defining commands that output the tar file to stdout. But
> nevertheless, I take your point that copying all the checks is rather
> annoying. Users can set the TAR envvar (and/or AMTAR, maybe) to get a
> different program, I believe.

I wouldn't be opposed to Autoconf shipping an AC_PROG_TAR, but it would
need to confine itself to like "find a tar program that can generate
POSIX-compliant tar archives and set @TAR@ to its name + any options
required to get the compliant output format", leaving operation mode,
source, destination and whatnot to the user.

zw