Status of libarchive/bsdtar maintainership

[Eugene Grosbein]

Hi!

I wonder what is status of our contrib/libarchive and bsdtar/bsdcpio etc. in modern versions of FreeBSD
in a sense of serious bug fixing. Long story short: I faced a bug in the libarchive bundled with 11.2
that makes it impossible to create reliable backups of live file system or its subtree
using cron+bsdtar utility that delegate actial work to the libarchive that just aborts
if a file disappears (is removed) in process (GNU tar continues with just warning).

This is serious issue for me as I used 'tar' command to make backups for distinct subtrees
since FreeBSD 6.x and when my GPS+ntpd subsystem went insane and shifted system clock to 3 years
in the future, I lost data in several thousands of RRD databases and looked for backups to restore them
and found only small portion of databases in the tar instead of full backup.

I've create the PR https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233006 and later attached a patch
solving the problem in same way as GNU tar deals with it.

Martin Matuska (mm) asked me to create an issue at GitHub for libarchive.
I have no GitHub account nor I need one, and he was so kind and created it himself:
https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1082

Almost 3 months have passed and no response from upstream.
Should we go ahead and fix it despite of it is part of contrib?