Re: [Bug-tar] Furture Timestamp corrupts time field

[Paul Eggert]

"Phil Roberts" <address@hidden> writes:

> The problem seems to occur when the year is extracted to the hh:mm field
> instead of the 'future' hh:mm time populating it.  This is proabably a
> result of the archive being created in a distant timezone where it is 10
> hours or so ahead of me (WinZip seems to handle this automagically and
> populates the hh:mm with valid data instead of the year).

On a GNU or Unix machine time zones shouldn't matter, since the time
stamps are all UTC.  Tar files also store all times in UTC.

However, if the tar file was created on a machine whose clock was
wrong, or whose time zone was set incorrectly (so its local time was
correct but UTC was wrong), or if it was created on some Windows box
whose opinion of UTC was wrong, then the tar file will indeed contain
UTC time stamps that appear to be in the future.

Another possibility is that the time zone or clock on the recipient
machine is messed up.

Anyway, it doesn't sound like a bug in GNU 'tar' itself.  People share
GNU tar files across time zones all the time.