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
