GNU tar was originally written by John Gilmore,
and modified by many people. The GNU enhancements were
written by Jay Fenlason, then Joy Kendall, and the whole package has
been further maintained by Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG, François
Pinard, Paul Eggert, and finally Sergey Poznyakoff with the help of
numerous and kind users.
We wish to stress that tar is a collective work, and owes much to
all those people who reported problems, offered solutions and other
insights, or shared their thoughts and suggestions. An impressive, yet
partial list of those contributors can be found in the THANKS
file from the GNU tar distribution.
Jay Fenlason put together a draft of a GNU tar
manual, borrowing notes from the original man page from John Gilmore.
This was withdrawn in version 1.11. Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG and Amy
Gorin worked on a tutorial and manual for GNU tar.
François Pinard put version 1.11.8 of the manual together by
taking information from all these sources and merging them. Melissa
Weisshaus finally edited and redesigned the book to create version
1.12.
For version 1.12, Daniel Hagerty contributed a great deal of technical
consulting. In particular, he is the primary author of Backups.
In July, 2003 GNU tar was put on CVS at savannah.gnu.org
(see https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar), and
active development and maintenance work has started
again. Currently GNU tar is being maintained by Paul Eggert, Sergey
Poznyakoff and Jeff Bailey.
Support for POSIX archives was added by Sergey Poznyakoff.
Published under the terms of the GNU General Public License
