GNU tar was based on an early draft of the POSIX 1003.1 ustar standard. GNU extensions to tar, such as the support for file names longer than 100 characters, use portions of the tar header record which were specified in that POSIX draft as unused. Subsequent changes in POSIX have allocated the same parts of the header record for other purposes. As a result, GNU tar is incompatible with the current POSIX spec, and with tar programs that follow it.

POSIX mandates that, when a file name cannot fit within 100 to 256 characters (the variance comes from the fact a / is ideally needed as the 156'th character), or a link name cannot fit within 100 characters, a warning should be issued and the file not be stored. Unless some --posix option is given (or POSIXLY_CORRECT is set), I suspect that GNU tar should disobey this specification, and automatically switch to using GNU extensions to overcome file name or link name length limitations.

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[JIRA] (JENKINS-13635) Backup warnings when performing tar.gz

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