[Bug-tar] Incompatible behavior between 1.23 and 1.27?

[Florian Fainelli]

Hi all,

(please CC me as I am not subscribed)

I have the following tar archive being constructed like this:

tar -C .. -cf ../rootfs-$(DOTVERSION).tar rootfs
tar -C .. -rf ../rootfs-$(DOTVERSION).tar -h rootfs/misc/release_builds

This done so as to de-reference just that file, there are other symbolic
links under rootfs/ that I do not want to de-reference, just this
particular one.

Now, while extracting this tar archive on two different systems I
noticed different behaviors:

- tar 1.23 extracts this just fine and rootfs/misc/release_builds
ends-up being a regular file

- tar 1.27 on the other extracts the file, but still has
rootfs/misc/release_builds as a symbolic link

Is this a known bug or feature, and if so, is there a known workaround
to proceed with extracting the second part of the tar file which
contains the de-referenced copy? Assuming that the bug is that there are
two files with different file types here.

Thank you!
-- 
Florian