;;; o Block files, sparse files, continuation files, and the various header
;;; types aren't editable. Actually I don't know that they work at all.
+;;; Rationale:
+
+;;; Why does tar-mode edit the file itself instead of using tar?
+
+;;; That means that you can edit tar files which you don't have room for
+;;; on your local disk.
+
+;;; I don't know about recent features in gnu tar, but old versions of tar
+;;; can't replace a file in the middle of a tar file with a new version.
+;;; Tar-mode can. I don't think tar can do things like chmod the subfiles.
+;;; An implementation which involved unpacking and repacking the file into
+;;; some scratch directory would be very wasteful, and wouldn't be able to
+;;; preserve the file owners.
+
;;; Code:
(defvar tar-anal-blocksize 20