Do tarballs still have that unfixed/unfixable bug where the extracted files will have the permissions of the person who untarr'd the file?
It is one of the goofy things about Unix systems is most tools speak uid/gid and woah is you if two machines on the network have “bob” only as different uid’s.
Not entirely sure if windows has the same problem as to be honest if you use active directory most of that stuff is auto-magic.
My hunch is that going with the ID vs. the “friendly name” has a bunch of trade offs and whichever you pick will come with serious drawbacks.
EDIT: To get the effect you want, run tar as root. That's required to ensure you have the permission to override the DAC system, first.
It's brought production to a halt on more than one occasion if I try to "restore" from a backup by extracting the files and moving into production without manually fixing them first.
If you extract as root, it'll preserve the owner and group. Otherwise, the default is to assign the owner and group of the user running tar.
It was PEBKAC, not tar's fault (GNU tar, anyway). Tar does store the original owner and permissions. But the ownership of the unpacked files -- do you really expect your process to set ownership of the files to another user?
The permissions would also be restored to 666 if you ran the tar as root; there are several options whose defaults depend on whether EUID is 0 or not.