tar: Pathname can't be converted from UTF-8 to current locale

[Greywolf <relayer%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi there, having a problem more and more building from pkgsrc (see Subject):

Output from "locale | awk '/CTYPE|LANG|ALL/' is as follows:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

I cannot seem to force TAR to be /usr/local/bin/gtar when extracting,
no matter what I try within my scope of knowledge. I've attempted the
full-on brute force method of:

TAR=/usr/local/bin/gtar make -e TAR=/usr/local/bin/gtar extract

and to no avail -- the value never makes it to the 'extract' script in
/usr/src/mk/extract/extract.

I would be appreciative of any clues pointing toward a solution.

[Note: LANG=C is my usual preferred (interactive) localisation -- I'm
only setting it here so I can build a package.]
-- 
--*greywolf;