Hi Karl,
thanks for the detailed answers.
We've run few more tests, and we've found a couple more issues.
1. As you pointed out, TAR_OPTIONS is working fine from the command
line, but it doesn't work when written inside Makefile.am, neither on
Mac, nor on Linux.
$ TAR_OPTIONS="--version"
$ ex
Good morning,
GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) uses GNU Autotools. A Gnuastro
developer encountered the "Numeric user ID too large" error when
generating a tarball with the 'make dist' command on his macOS (Monterey
12.3) laptop. His user id is an integer with 9 digits, which is too big
for
