Hello, I've just noticed that https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/Portability.html#SEC151 has references to a 'xstar' program, but from reading the surrounding text I believe this is a typo, and it should in fact say 'xsparse' instead. And it looks like this typo is indeed still present in the tar git repository http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/tree/doc/tar.texi#n10128
Regards, Andrew Scheller