Seems more recent versions of tars include various extensions that can confuse older versions of tar. I wasn't even aware that my gnu tar defaulted to POSIX 2002 headers (pax) until someone told me their build used ARCHIVE::TAR, that doesn't understand them.
Problem has been temporarily glossed over by adding flags to my build process ( dist => { TARFLAGS=> 'c --format=v7 -f' },) but this bothers me -- alot! Since if someone else tries a make tardist -- it will fail if their tar doesn't understand those flags. So it looks like that might not be a very good solution. Ideas... How can I specify a tar that will work for others that will work for others if they build? FWIW -- I first encountered this when *my* tar (gnu) complained about "star" (schelly) headers in a CPAN file... I reported it as a minor bug .. HA, talk about instant karma... But I'm not seeing a great solution. Too bad Archive::Tar isn't up-to-date with a 10+year old standard. Maybe it should be dropped from new distros?