GNU tar installation?

[Paul Howarth]

Erik P. Olsen wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 09:29 -0500, Leonard Isham wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:06:30 +0100, Erik P. Olsen <erik at epo.dk> wrote:
>>
>>>Excuse me for asking a newbie question, but I am a little uneasy about
>>>what to do.
>>>
>>>I am running FC3 which comes with GNU tar version 1.14. I plan to
>>>upgrade it to version 1.15.1 which comes in tar format only. What is the
>>>recommended way of installing it? Should I remove it first and risk that
>>>the installation may require tar processing?
>>
>>Take a moment and think about this.
>>
>>1. You want to upgrade tar
>>2. The new version of tar comes as a tarball
>>3. If you delete/remove tar then how are you going to read the tarball?
> 
> I have no problem in untaring the tarball.
> 
>>4. Download the new tar's tarball and untar it look at the
>>documentation and determine how you wat to proceed from there.
> 
> Sorry, I shouldn't have asked the question. I was just looking for a
> friendly advice.
> 
>>Above all if you are unsure and can't risk messing up your system 
>>Then consider how bad you need the latest tar, and if you can wait for
>>the RPM.

It's not hard to build your own RPM to update your system. I downloaded 
the SRPM for 1.14 and the tarball for 1.15.1, updated the tar specfile 
and a couple of the patches and then built a new RPM for version 1.15.1. 
The result can be found at: http://www.city-fan.org/~paul/tar/

It works for me but of course YMMV as I've done very little testing. 
Most of the testsuite is run during the build though and the tests that 
are run do pass.

Cheers, Paul.