Like reported in https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=36851 I have had issues with the tar task not being able to use filenames with UTF-8 characters. Consulting the source code I could see that there is an implementation of the longfile="posix" option I committed, built and installed version 1.9.0alpha and was given the following error: BUILD FAILED /Users/aacirino/Documents/ws/vtta1.0/build.xml:60: Problem creating TAR: request to write '110' bytes exceeds size in header of '0' bytes for entry './PaxHeaders.X/vtta.woa/Contents/Frameworks/JavaXML.framework/WebServerResources/Java/com/ibm/wsdl/' when trying to build the install files for my application under Eclipse. It is also worth mentioning that the current tar task manual states that there is a posix option for version 1.8.4, what isn't true: http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/tar.html To circumvent this issue I changed my build file to use zip instead of tar, but tar is preferable due to the ability of setting file permissions in the build file.
what you see is Ant's version of https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COMPRESS-203 whose fix was merged into Ant in December 2012 - so it should work with 1.9.0's final release. BTW, you can specify file permissions for zip as well.