Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi> writes:
>
> 2) Change calls to 'tar' to format ${GNU_TAR:-tar} so testers can set 
>    environment variable GNU_TAR to the name/path of gnu tar when running
>    tests (like GNU_TAR=/usr/local/bin/gtar make test or GNU_TAR=gtar ...)

I don't really see any downside to this option; there's only a few calls
to tar to replace.  Of course we could bikeshed about whether to write 

TAR=${GNU_TAR:-tar}
...

${TAR} --frub --blah 

instead of testing GNU_TAR everywhere.

But, shrug...

d