bug#9822: AMTAR not used

[Akim Demaille]

Hi all,

My apologies if this has already been discussed.  

I too have been hit by the fact that Tar on OS X tries to preserve special 
features of files in "hidden" files (a thread about this started here: 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2011-03/msg00127.html, and seems to 
end here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2011-04/msg00001.html).

There are several means to address this, one being defining a couple of envvars 
before calling OS X's tar (as discussed above), the other being using GNU Tar.

Unfortunately 1.11.1 generates code like this:

AMTAR = ${SHELL} /Users/akim/src/gostai/kernel-2.7/build-aux/missing --run tar
...
am__tar = tar --format=ustar -chf - "$$tardir"
am__untar = tar -xf -

(I cannot see AMTAR being used.)  I would prefer to have something like

TAR = tar
AMTAR = ${SHELL} /Users/akim/[...]/build-aux/missing --run ${TAR}
am__tar = $(AMTAR) --format=ustar -chf - "$$tardir"
am__untar = $(AMTAR) -xf -

so that I can "make dist TAR=gnutar" and have magic happen.  This would also 
require that missing understands gnutar in addition to tar, possibly qualified. 
 Or missing could be extended to have one flag for the "class" of the program 
(this is a "tar", a constant string), and then --run which gives the command 
line starting with the genuine command (/opt/local/bin/gnumake for my example).

Alternatively, if AMTAR is not useful (as it seems in 1.11.1), then

TAR = tar
am__tar = $(TAR) --format=ustar -chf - "$$tardir"
am__untar = $(TAR) -xf -

would be fine!

Cheers!

PS/  Actually if AMTAR/TAR could also set the two troublesome envvars, that 
would be wonderful :)