delete bugs?

[Shawn P. Neugebauer]

Hi,

After much poking around, without success, trying to find current info on
known bugs in tar (including looking for mailing list archives, etc., etc.)
I've decided to try the list directly.

It appears that tar-1.13.19 has two nasty bugs w/regard to the
delete option.  First, if no members are specified, the archive
is corrupted.  Second, if a non-existent member is specified, the
archive is corrupted.  The problem was originally noticed on
both Debian (not sure which version) and RedHat 7.1, but has
since been verified in the RedHat 7.3 binary distribution
(tar-1.13.25) and in the tar-1.13.19 source distributed with RedHat 7.1.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) it looks like the problems are a function
of the size of the archive members:  sometimes, the archive is not
corrupted, sometimes it is.  I can provide examples.

Is this known/unknown?  FYI: this started with an innocuous-enough
question, posted to the mailing list of a local user's group, about
*how* to use the delete option in tar.

shawn.