[very common; prob. based on the tar baby
in the
Uncle Remus folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar1 utility,
containing myriad related files. Here, I'll just ftp you a tarball
of the whole project.
Tarballs have been the standard way to ship
around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s; in retrospect it
seems odd that this term did not enter common usage until the late
1990s.