I've written a tar that owes nothing to anything else. It's in the public domain and hence is free for NetBSD to steal, anything from lifting it verbatim to swiping ideas from. It doesn't currently have anything like --fast-read; that hadn't occurred to me. Now that it's been pointed out, I'll be adding it; I think it's a valuable addition, whether or not NetBSD wants my tar.
Binary packages can be installed with the high-level tool pkgin (which can be installed with pkg_add) or pkg_add(1) (installed by default). The NetBSD packages collection is also designed to permit easy installation from source.
The pkg_admin audit command locates any installed package which has been mentioned in security advisories as having vulnerabilities.
Please note the vulnerabilities database might not be fully accurate, and not every bug is exploitable with every configuration.
Problem reports, updates or suggestions for this package should be reported with send-pr.