A. Regrading Jakub's tests, I suppose the changes needed are to 
for every name in tar
i) find reasonable occurrence of symlink's name and replace it with smylink's linkname
ii) convert it to normal path and then check for relative / absolute paths

B. Jakub, are your tests exhaustive or there maybe some corner cases missing? I think we don't have tests for hardlinks, yet. Also I think, we will need tests for CHRTYPE, FIFOTYPE and BLKTYPE of tar's typeflag[0]


[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Standard.html