Tar extraction: Member name contains `..'

[Fred Ma]

I've been googling and google-grouping the gnu tar problem 
where file extraction generates the error message:

   Member name contains `..'

It seems like one can capture files with paths having "..", but not
extract them.  I am using version 1.13.25 on Cygwin, but this problem
seems to be many years old, and span many target OS's.  I haven't been
able to find a solution, short of editing the tar file with vim.  Has
there been a solution?  I would have thought that a reasonable
behaviour would be one of the following:

   1. Explicitly disallow the inclusion of such files in the tar file
      through the use of an informative error message, and don't
      bother using up the bytes to embed such a file in the tar
      archive (since it can't be retrieved anyway).

   2. Allow the inclusion of such files with a warning.  Warn of the
      presence of such files in the extraction, and do not extract
      them by default.  But do allow this default to be overridden.

Fred
-- 
Fred Ma
Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada