Re: [Bug-tar] Tar 1.27 has become non-deterministic

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hi Nathan,

> This patch works to produce unchanging tar archives in my test case
> here (on Linux).

Great. 

> I was curious if you had a particular reason to use "-1" instead of "0"
> here?

No particular reason at all, except that it forces start_private_header
to use 0 as mtime.  Using 0 instead is much better indeed.
 
> (For what it's worth, with [just] this patch, David's scripts will still
> detect "phantom" changes in the archives when he first moves from 1.26
> to 1.27, due to the change in the umask field values for these LongLink
> entries.)

Yes, I know.  But that cannot be helped: start_private_header is used
in other places where safe umask is important (perhaps in this case
too).

Regards,
Sergey