[Bug-tar] gtar 1.15.2 (cvs 20051214) "lone zero block" & "skipping header" issues

[John R. Vanderpool]

we recently dumped RH EL3 & EL4 gtar because it was not working right at
all with large amounts of files and --incremental-file (would *silently*
not back up many files).  so we went with version gtar 1.15.2 (cvs
20051214) which seems to fix that problem.

however, today we were doing a restore (tar on tape created and extracted
with this new version) and encountered many "lone zero block" & tons of
"skipping header" messages.

i did a search and found a bunch of posts from like 2003/4 about the lone
zero being fixed so am wondering why we're seeing it again?  if we use
--ignore-zeros it will continue on but don't have a good feeling about
the whole thing.

we also saw spurious "does not look like tar" and "unknown file type `p'"
messages,  tape drive is not reporting any errors and we tried multiple
drives and different tapes.