Tarball produced by Archive::Tar::Wrapper + GNU tar 1.23 is not readable by HP-UX tar

[plicease]

It was reported by me that one of my tarball dists was not readable by the default HP-UX tar because GNU tar 1.23 uses defaults that do not work with tar implementations that do not support GNU extensions.

PerlAlien/Alien-Build#228

One way to work around this is to use Archive::Tar instead, but there isn't a way to disable Archive::Tar::Wrapper (as far as I can tell) if it happens to be installed.

rjbs/Dist-Zilla#662

I am not sure how hard it would be, but it would be nice if Archive::Tar::Wrapper could either

1. Detect GNU tar (looks like it might already be doing this) and use the --format=ustar option to produce a more backward compatible tarball.
2. Provide an option to explicitly do the same.

[haarg]

There are also other systems that will produce PaxHeaders by default. One of my MacOS machines has a uid/gid that doesn't fit in standard ustar headers. Using the --format=ustar option will produce an empty tarball. This can be fixed by using --format=ustar --uid=0 --gid=0 when using bsd tar, or --format=ustar --owner=0 --group=0 with GNU tar.

[plicease]

For tarball releases of perl dists I think setting UID + GID to zero is fine, but I can imagine that for some use cases that may not be acceptable. It is probably therefore best if implemented that this be opt-in.

I think supporting GNU tar and bsdtar would probably benefit the majority of users and support for other systems can be added later.

[glasswalk3r]

That falls on the same situation of #16: each OS seems to have their own particular configurations and/or versions of tar that are incompatible with each other.

The way to go in this case, as I see, is to create a dispatch table using the OS name as keys just like we are doing for Microsoft Windows and OpenBSD.

From there, we would execute a function to return an object configured with any little detail that is required to make the tar binary to work as expected.

My only concern is that Archive::Tar::Wrapper was created to overcome the slowness of Archive::Tar, so if anything, we shouldn't make it overly complex to the point there is a performance penalty.

Some refactoring will be required to do that, although. I started doing it in the past, but never finished.

Of course, I'm opened to suggestions too.

[glasswalk3r]

@plicease , can you please provide a PR for this tar implementation?