Hi all,
I pleased to announce the release of archive-tar-external 1.2.0. This project was formerly known as archive-tarsimple. In the interests of consistency, as well as continued good relations between the U.S. and Canada and general Interstellar Harmony, The package, as well as the internal class, have been renamed.
What is it?
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A simple wrapper for external system calls to deal with tarballs and zipped/gzip'd/bzip'd files.
What's new?
The package name on the RAA is now tar-external.
The package name on RubyForge is now archive-tar-external.
The base class is now Tar::External (nested under the Archive module).
In addition to the naming changes, there are two new class methods and one new instance method:
Tar::External.uncompress_archive - For those times you want to uncompress an archive that already exists.
Tar::External.extract_archive - For those times you want to untar a tarball that already exists.
Tar::External#compressed_archive_name= - For those times you want to create a new Tar::External object from an archive that already exists.
See the docs for more details on these methods.
Why the name change?
It was pointed out to me that not only was the naming scheme inconsistent, using Archive::Tar might cause potential name clashes. That, and it wasn't really clear from the name that this isn't a wrapper for zlib.
Hopefully this will not cause folks too much grief. Based on the download stats I've seen on RubyForge....I doubt it. 
Where is it?
You can get it on the RAA or RubyForge (under the 'shards' project).
Enjoy!
Dan