Thanks, I am aware of tricks like that, but it gets tiring really fast, so I don't use that in practice. Why can't they just add another flag to tar to call a program that would produce the ordering, just like they have compressor flags?
I actually do not really know why they bothered with the -z -j and such compression options when you could already pipe to a compressor of choice.
You are "they" - you can add that flag. If it turns out that it works well, it'll (probably) be taken and added to whichever `tar` implementations you submit patches for.
#!/bin/bash
find $3 type -f | rev | sort | rev | tar -cv $2 -T /dev/stdin -f $1
goodtar -j output.tar mydir