Tar fails when tarball contains an old file

[MorenoM <MorenoM at xenos dot org>]

I'm running cygwin 1.5.5-1 on win2k and finally figured out that when
attempting to untar a tarball containing a file with a timestamp of
1/1/1970, it fails - in this case, killing cpan:

tar: libwww-perl-5.76/README: Cannot utime: Invalid argument

This makes sense since window's epoch is 1/1/1980, making it impossible to
accurately transcript the true (though perhaps bogus) modification date.  I
presume that all dates prior to 1980 would be problematic.  Seems to me that
tar should do the best it can by setting the timestamp to 1/1/1980 and issue
a warning, but not fail.

I'm new to the group and searched the archives, but not seen this issue
addressed.  And I'm not sure if this is really a bug in tar, but the *nix
folks won't ever encounter this problem.

Thanks,

Marco Moreno

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