incompatibility in newer tar version

[Raffaele Costa]

I write this to complain about a non-backwards-compatible change made on
GNU tar 1.13 w.r.t. version (at least) 1.11.8 and other non-gnu tars
(e.g. the Solaris one).

In the past, arguments to --exclude and entries in files specified in
"-X" exclude files were FILE NAMES, not PATTERNS. Therefore, if one
wanted to make a full dump of his/her system but excluding the /usr/bin
directory, he/she could write:
  cd /; tar cf /dev/tape --exclude usr/bin .
Now, with version 1.13, I have the following two problems:
- my old scripts using --exclude are failing;
- even if I modify these scripts, writing "--exclude bin" instead of
"--exclude usr/bin", also directories /bin, /usr/local/bin,
/home/username/bin and who knows how many others are excluded from the
tape. I could find no way to exclude just /usr/bin from the tape, since
a "/" in the pattern will yield a pattern that never matches.

Pattern matching surely is a nice feature, but it is better to give it
its own name, --exclude-PATTERN, without removing other useful features.

Until this is fixed, I will continue using the older 1.11.8 tar version
(but probably you don't care about that...).

Thanks,
        Raffaele Costa