One of your distributions' tarballs contains macOS extended attributes (like com.apple.provenance). What's going on?

Depending on which tar you use to extract it, you might see something harmless like GNU tar's:

tar: Ignoring unknown extended header keyword 'LIBARCHIVE.xattr.com.apple.provenance'

or, with a tar that actually attempts to honor the attribute (for example when extracting as root), an outright error trying to restore an attribute that makes no sense on your platform.

The easiest workaround is to avoid extracting the tarball as root, and/or tell tar not to bother with the extended attributes at all:

• With GNU tar, use the option --warning=no-unknown-keyword to supress the warnings explicitly.

  tar --warning=no-unknown-keyword -xf Some-Dist-1.23.tar.gz

• With a libarchive-based tar (the default on macOS, FreeBSD and NetBSD), extracting as a non-root user already skips extended attributes by default. As root, it tries to restore them, which is what triggers the error — so either extract as a normal user, or pass --no-xattrs explicitly:

  tar --no-xattrs -xf Some-Dist-1.23.tar.gz

This shouldn't normally happen. The vast majority of my distributions releases are from Linux, and/or built using a Dist::Zilla plugin that produces the release tarball itself, rather than shelling out to the system tar. Neither of those paths pick up macOS extended attributes.

If you've run into a tarball that does contain them, it's almost certainly one of the few older, "classic" distributions that are still built the old fashioned way, with a hand-written Makefile.PL and ExtUtils::MakeMaker's own make dist. On macOS, that target shells out to the system tar, which by default stores any extended attributes present on the files being archived (such as com.apple.provenance, which macOS adds to files automatically, for example when they've been downloaded or extracted from another archive) as extended pax headers in the resulting tarball.

If this is a bug, then it is a bug in ExtUtils::MakeMaker's make dist target, which doesn't strip or disable extended attribute propagation when it invokes tar on macOS. If you run into it, please report it to ExtUtils::MakeMaker rather than the individual distribution — it isn't something specific to any one distribution's code, and any classic Makefile.PL-based dist released from a Mac is equally exposed to it.