[bestouff]

I wrote an incomplete tar parser (genext2fs author here) because I also thought tar was easy. Believe me nothing could be more wrong. That old underspecified file format is full of weird addons by different implementations, bug workarounds, it's big and hard to get right.

Eventually I gave in and added libarchive as an alternative.

[kevin_thibedeau]

If you stick to the modern format it's simple. If you are only using modern tooling there's no need to support the legacy headers.