[Bug-tar] GNU tar 1.16.1

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the release of GNU tar 1.16.1.

This is a maintenance release for the 1.16 series.  It fixes some
potential security problems and provides several new features (see the
list below).  Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and
bug reports and have helped improve the package quality.

GNU tar is an archiver that creates and handles file archives in various
formats. You can use tar to create file archives, to extract files from
previously created archives, store additional files, or update or list
files which were already stored.

For more information on tar, including links to file downloads,
please see the tar web page: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar
and the the project page http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar.  

GNU tar is available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar and
the mirror sites worldwide (see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
for the list of those).

The files and their MD5 checksums are:

465f14e03079532922e18ab3a30b6c53  tar-1.16.1.cpio.gz
c3fc11f1a415dbc35a837fd788235eeb  tar-1.16.1.cpio.gz.sig
988294a166cf6db88d2091067a3f74f2  tar-1.16.1.shar.gz
041ab2ee7d868e5b4e1f914578f61379  tar-1.16.1.shar.gz.sig
d51593461c5ef1f7e37134f22338bb9e  tar-1.16.1.tar.bz2
34c522f802556786c87a249b6ca1521d  tar-1.16.1.tar.bz2.sig
8ecfdd38740aadb8e17129e70803589a  tar-1.16.1.tar.gz
48f00d821b632e412001612eb887225b  tar-1.16.1.tar.gz.sig

Noteworthy changes:

* New option --exclude-tag allows to specify "exclusion tag files", i.e. 
  files whose presence in a directory means that the directory should not 
  be archived.

* The --exclude-cache option excludes directories that contain the
  CACHEDIR.TAG file from being archived.  Previous versions excluded
  directory contents only, while the directories themselves were
  still added to the archive. 

* Support for reading ustar type 'N' header logical records has been removed.
  This GNU extension was generated only by very old versions of GNU 'tar'.
  Unfortunately its implementation had security holes; see
  <http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-11/0344.html>.
  We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N'
  records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can
  decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier.

* Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
  files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when
  running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.

Regards,
Sergey