Package: generalstar (http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/star.html) should become the standard tar on Debian. GNU tar has lots of known bugs and it's just ugly. No one is able to maintain GNU tar right because it's an ugly hack, not beiing POSIX compliant and not even generating correct tar archives by default. star does all this better and has ACL support additionally ...