bug#26734: Snippets (even empty ones) of tar sources reset the timestamps of all files

[Mark H Weaver]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> BTW, what timestamps to we put on the modified files?  We want that to
> be deterministic so we cannot use the build time.  We cannot use a date
> in the future, either.  We cannot use Jan. 1 1970 either because that
> means that modified files may now be older than the unmodified files,
> which may break build systems; for the same reason, we cannot leave the
> mtime of modified files unchanged.
>
> Now that I think about it, it’s not clear to me what can be done without
> breaking something.
>
> Thoughts?

We could set the timestamp of modified files to be 1 second newer than
the newest file in the original source archive.

      Mark