Package: tar Version: 1.29-1 Severity: important Recent versions of tar ignore the --no-recursion option when creating an archive. Here is a small example, where the file 'b' appears twice in the created tar:
$ mkdir a $ touch a/b $ find a -print0 | tar -c --null -T - --no-recursion -f test.tar $ tar tvf test.tar drwxr-xr-x aurel32/aurel32 0 2016-07-05 16:15 a/ -rw-r--r-- aurel32/aurel32 0 2016-07-05 16:15 a/b -rw-r--r-- aurel32/aurel32 0 2016-07-05 16:15 a/b $ It seems to have been introduced by the following change in version 1.28-2: * patch from upstream to fix --files-from and recursive extract, closes: #800380 As this is the recommended way to create a tarball by the reproducible build team, this causes a lot of space waste in the debian archive and on the users disks. Note that this way of creating archive is also described in the tar documentation: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/recurse.html -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.6.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages tar depends on: ii libacl1 2.2.52-3 ii libc6 2.23-1 ii libselinux1 2.5-3 tar recommends no packages. Versions of packages tar suggests: ii bzip2 1.0.6-8 pn ncompress <none> pn tar-scripts <none> ii xz-utils 5.1.1alpha+20120614-2.1 -- no debconf information