The result of a makepkg run produced what looked like a totally garbled package, when viewed in mc's virtual file system. That led me to investigate a bit, so I tried packing up a few directories with bsdtar and sometimes got similarly garbled results. However, unpacking worked completely normally, as also did viewing the archives in xarchiver or squeeze. If I use tar instead of bsdtar to do the packing, they appear normally in mc. Does anyone know what's going on here? Is it mc that is getting something wrong, or bsdtar?
