tar Authors
GNU tar was originally written by John Gilmore, and modified by
many people. The GNU enhancements were written by Jay Fenlason, then
Joy Kendall, and the whole package has been further maintained by
Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG, and finally Fran@,{c}ois Pinard, with
the help of numerous and kind users.
We wish to stress that tar is a collective work, and owes much to
all those people who reported problems, offered solutions and other
insights, or shared their thoughts and suggestions. An impressive, yet
partial list of those contributors can be found in the `THANKS'
file from the GNU tar distribution.
@FIXME{i want all of these names mentioned, Absolutely. BUT, i'm not sure i want to spell out the history in this detail, at least not for the printed book. i'm just not sure it needs to be said this way. i'll think about it.}
@FIXME{History is more important, and surely more interesting, than actual names. Quoting names without history would be meaningless. FP}
Jay Fenlason put together a draft of a GNU tar manual,
borrowing notes from the original man page from John Gilmore. This
draft has been distributed in tar versions 1.04 (or even
before?) @FIXME{huh? IMO, either we know or we don't; the
parenthetical is confusing.} through 1.10, then withdrawn in version
1.11. Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG and Amy Gorin worked on a tutorial and
manual for GNU tar. Fran@,{c}ois Pinard put version 1.11.8
of the manual together by taking information from all these sources
and merging them. Melissa Weisshaus finally edited and redesigned the
book to create version 1.12. @FIXME{update version number as
necessary; i'm being optimistic!} @FIXME{Someone [maybe karl berry?
maybe bob chassell? maybe melissa? maybe julie sussman?] needs to
properly index the thing.}
For version 1.12, Daniel Hagerty contributed a great deal of technical consulting. In particular, he is the primary author of section Performing Backups and Restoring Files.
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