The paxutils project was started somewhere near 1994-06-30 (at least
this is the date of the earliest entry in the ChangeLog for version
2.4h). Unfortunately it has never reached mature status and was
abandoned after 1999-06-11 (again, as per its ChangeLog). Both
GNU tar and cpio, which were included in this project, have since
then developed independently, which brought all projects out
of synch with each other.

On 2003-06-21 I have taken the maintenance of GNU tar, on 2003-11-01
that of cpio, and finally on 2003-12-19 that of paxutils. By that time
tar needed lots of work, so I decided first to take care of it, in the
mean time preparing it and cpio for the future merging. The version 1.14
of tar (the first stable version since 1999) was released on 2004-05-11,
the next maintenance release (1.14.90) followed it on 2004-09-02.
On 2004-09-06, after more than half a year's delay, Savannah finally
approved the project, and I started merging the three projects.

More information about backgrounds of GNU paxutils and its history
is available at http://paxutils.progiciels-bpi.ca.