PAX : Incompatible with tar?

[Rick Richardson]

Is PAX supposed to be compatible with tar?  I made a pax archive
of directory 'pax'.  Running 'pax -v' on this I get:

USTAR format archive
drwxr-xr-x  0 rick     pcr     	         Feb  5 18:24 pax
-rw-r--r--  0 rick     pcr     	    2308 Feb  5 18:04 pax/811.hdr
-rw-r--r--  0 rick     pcr     	      64 Feb  5 18:03 pax/PATCHLEVEL
-rw-r--r--  0 rick     pcr     	    4822 Feb  5 18:03 pax/README
...

Running SYS V 'tar tv' I get:

-rwxr-xr-x100/100      0 Feb  5 18:24 1989 pax
-rw-r--r--100/100   2308 Feb  5 18:04 1989 pax/811.hdr
-rw-r--r--100/100     64 Feb  5 18:03 1989 pax/PATCHLEVEL
-rw-r--r--100/100   4822 Feb  5 18:03 1989 pax/README
...

Note that 'tar' doesn't think that the first file 'pax' is a directory.
When extracting with tar, this causes an error as the first thing
extracted is a plain file.  It then becomes impossible to extract
anything else, as the 'pax' directory can't be created.

With zoo format looking a lot more useful than either tar or cpio,
is there any reason why pax should invent yet another format?

-- 
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