bug#73316: Numeric user ID too large when generating the tarball

[glorenzetti]

Good morning,

GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) uses GNU Autotools. A Gnuastro 
developer encountered the "Numeric user ID too large" error when 
generating a tarball with the 'make dist' command on his macOS (Monterey 
12.3) laptop. His user id is an integer with 9 digits, which is too big 
for the old v7 and ustar formats of tar.

The issue is discussed in Gnuastro's bug tracker 
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65578), where the work-around conclusion 
was to use a conditional that adds 'tar-pax' to 'AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE' when 
the user ID is so large. For reference, here is Gnuastro's configure.ac: 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuastro.git/tree/configure.ac#n44
The issue was also erroneusly reported in autoconf's bug tracker 
(https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?111123).

Even though we encountered this problem in macOS, this problem may not 
be limited to it. Other user management systems who use such large IDs 
may also cause this issue.

While it is possible to write such workaround downstream in Gnuastro, it 
would be nice to have the issue solved upstream in the GNU Autotools 
since it can happen for any other developer of other software that uses 
Autotools.

Best Regards,
Giacomo Lorenzetti