say "we create old ustar" more clearly
stores various attributes including information about the
original owner and permissions.</p>
- <p>There are several different tar formats and the TAR package
- of Compress 1.4 mostly only provides the common functionality
- of the existing variants.</p>
-
- <p>The original format (often called "ustar") didn't support
- file names longer than 100 characters or bigger than 8 GiB and
- the tar package will by default fail if you try to write an
- entry that goes beyond those limits.</p>
+ <p>There are several different dialects of the TAR format, maybe
+ even different TAR formats. The tar package contains special
+ cases in order to read many of the existing dialects and will by
+ default try to create archives in the original format (often
+ called "ustar"). This original format didn't support file names
+ longer than 100 characters or bigger than 8 GiB and the tar
+ package will by default fail if you try to write an entry that
+ goes beyond those limits. "ustar" is the common denominator of
+ all the existing tar dialects and is understood by most of the
+ existing tools.</p>
<p>The tar package does not support the full POSIX tar standard
nor more modern GNU extension of said standard.</p>
