1.16.1 is latest release. -thanks-
yeah, I know 1.15-1 is old. I work on 1.16-1 upgrade. http://people.redhat.com/pvrabec/rpms/tar-1.16.1-1.src.rpm (it needs some spec file fixes like autoreconf in prep stage) But we need to make sure 1.16-1 works with anaconda. And I got this response from anaconda maintainer(fenlason) "I seet a potential problem: there are no entries for directories in the generated archive, so anyone attempting to restore will have to reset permissions and ownership by hand. This is bad. . ."
there is a upgrade candidate, which fix the problem in comment #1. http://people.redhat.com/pvrabec/rpms/tar-1.16.1-1.src.rpm
changelog tar-1.17 2007-06-08: * Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions padded sparse members with spurious zero blocks. * Fix operation of --verify --listed-incremental. Version 1.16.1 produced a full dump when both options were given. * Fix --occurence. In previous versions it continued scanning the archive even though all requested members has already been extracted. * Scope of --transform and --strip-components options. In addition to affecting regular archive members, the --transform option affects hard and symbolic link targets and the --strip-components option affects hard link targets as well. * End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable TAR_FD (instead of hard-coded descriptor number used in previous versions).
version 1.18 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-29 * Licensed under the GPLv3 * Fixed several bugs in the testsuite
1.17 now built in devel I hope it won't break other packages. Issue from comment #1 seems to be resolved and I also created patch for wildcards bug #206841. In 1.18, there really are no significant changes, just the GPLv3 thing.