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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> 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.

Sounds like a good idea.

Thanks,
Ludo’.