[Bug-tar] Exclude options are ignored

[cjdl01]

Hi,

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but for some time, the last  
several revisions of tar have been ignoring the -X or the --exclude  
options.

This was mentioned in the debian bugs here:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=831007

It is also mentioned in the debian forums, but the thread was hijacked  
by someone in need of some serious psychological counseling.

But I couldn't find corollary in the bug-tar archives... so I wanted  
to make sure it was on record.

I don't know about others... but I still use tar extensively for my  
system backups, on many systems.  The exclude option is critical to  
keep from the backup choking on itself, and filling up hard drives...

I've been looking, and cannot find an adequate work-around for this,  
other than to pull older versions of GNU tar, and compile them from  
source.

Is this known?  Do you ever intend to fix this?

Thanks.