For what it's worth, I'd submitted a patch (attached) to Gottox, the guy who wrote sltar, which added creation support, but he never wound up applying it.
With that, and pipes to gzip, or bzip2, you can have all the tar functionality you know and love. But, at the same time, plan9 tar works well, and doesn't suck.
sltar-0.2.1-create.diff
Description: Binary data
