For more information see the README file within VMSBACKUP.TAR; this
file just concerns unpacking the distribution.

To unpack, "tar xvf VMSBACKUP.TAR".

As for where to get a copy of VMS TAR; I'm not really sure what the
"best" or "most official" site is, but try the following (if the DECUS
one doesn't work, try starting at http://www.decus.org and searching
for VMSTAR):

ftp://ftp.cyclic.com/pub/cvs/vms (Alpha VMS binary)
http://delonline.cern.ch/disk$user/duns/doc/vms/gunzip_and_vmstar.html
http://www.decus.org/http-wais/dws-do-post-wais.pl?A+%2fusr%2flocal%2fhttpdocs%2flibcatalog%2fdescription%5fhtml%2fvs0185%2ehtml+%2flibcatalog%2fdescription%5fhtml+VMSTAR

As for why I am currently using tar, this is not necessarily intended
as the "best" or "eventual" packaging tool for Free-VMS source
distributions, and I'm willing to consider suggestions, but for the
moment it seems to avoid a few of the problems with the alternatives:

    * BACKUP may be a good choice, but I do much of my work on a
    linux system and my version of BACKUP (or any other free one)
    doesn't yet write savesets, only read them.

    * ZIP doesn't seem to have any way to handle STREAM_LF versus
    variable length records (ZIP gurus, correct me if I'm wrong).  At
    least until we have a running Free-VMS system, we probably have to
    accomodate the reality that some people will be developing using
    linux or other non-VMS-like systems.