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### 1.5 GNU `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, François Pinard, Paul Eggert, and finally Sergey Poznyakoff 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.

Jay Fenlason put together a draft of a GNU `tar` manual, borrowing notes from the original man page from John Gilmore. This was withdrawn in version 1.11. Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG and Amy Gorin worked on a tutorial and manual for GNU `tar`. François 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. The book for versions from 1.14 up to 1.32 were edited by the current maintainer, Sergey Poznyakoff.

For version 1.12, Daniel Hagerty contributed a great deal of technical consulting. In particular, he is the primary author of Backups.

In July, 2003 GNU `tar` was put on CVS at savannah.gnu.org (see http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar), and active development and maintenance work has started again. Currently GNU `tar` is being maintained by Paul Eggert, Sergey Poznyakoff and Jeff Bailey.

Support for POSIX archives was added by Sergey Poznyakoff.

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