Re: tar -I incompatibility

[Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com>]

> Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 12:07:14 -0500
> From: Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org>

> I certainly hope that the debian version at least prevents serious
> silent breakage by either reverting the change to -I and printing a
> message that the option is deprecated or removing the -I flag
> entirely.

Why would deprecating or removing the -I flag help prevent serious
silent breakage?  I would think that most people using -I in the
1.13.17 sense would use it like this:

tar -xIf archive.tar

and this silently breaks in 1.13.18 only in the unlikely case where
"f" is a readable tar file.

I'm not entirely opposed to deprecating -I for a while -- but I want
to know why it's helpful to do this before installing such a change.