On 2024-01-30 10:57, Sam James wrote:
The whole thing is bizarre and continues to catch people by surprise: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2017-05/msg00002.html.
Yes, if I could go back decades in time I would say "don't implement it that way -- add an option instead!" What 'tar' currently does is a recipe for confusion.
Perhaps it's time to evolve tar in the direction that it should have gone back in the 1980s. That is, we add an option --remote to require remote interpretation of file names, and warn if a remote file name is used without --remote. Eventually we can make --remote the default. (There may be a better option name than "--remote"; we can look at other programs for ideas.)
