So you're saying that the old tar works, and new tar doesn't and therefore you are not seeing a MiNT problem ??
I have corrected myself in the last email ;) So yes, there's a special MiNT case but it was hidden to me because the old tar is properly patched while the new one (incl. the one in the Sparemint repository now) is not. Now the question is, is the old src.rpm available somewhere? Because Peter not only didn't apply the patches but he also removed them from the RPM package.