name length limit

[Cliff Wright]

When making a tar file that included a file that had more than 100 characters 
in it's full name(including directory portions), the name was silently 
truncated. I see in the header file common.h the line:
#define NAME_FIELD_SIZE   100
Being as how most unix systems have a name length limit of 511 characters for a 
full name(255 for a single componet), this seems a rather short limit. I wonder 
if this is due to a compatibilty issue, or maybe a poxix issue, or is this a 
bug? Although I think it would be difficult for tar to handle all file systems, 
I think the typical 511 limit would be good to handle. The version of tar I was 
looking at was 1.13.19. If their is a browseable cvs it was not immediately 
obvious to me, so hope I am not reporting an already changed item.
        Cliff Wright(address@hidden)