The other interpretation is that instead of reinventing the wheel purely for tar, it's all been factored out into a standardised library anything can use for ge

The other interpretation is that instead of reinventing the wheel purely for tar, it's all been factored out into a standardised library anything can use for generic archiving tasks. e.g. instead of: 440K gtar 151K gcpio 144K unzip Base has: 655K libarchive.so.6 57K bsdtar 37K bsdcpio 20K unzip 34K bigger, much wider format support, and directly usable by other tools like pkg and ar, as well as third party apps like tarsnap and cmake.