I guess the only thing of interest here is that even a program like tar can have major bugs like these cropping up from time to time.
At the time of this post, one of the two referenced bugs had already been fixed, and the other was fixed the next day. A stable release including the fixes was made a week later, so it's likely that nobody other than testers and gentoo users were affected.
Not that I should talk, since I suck at writing tests, but this sounds like something that could have easily been caught by an automated test suite. A program as old and venerable as tar should have one of those by now, one would think.
