Re: RFC: Sort tarballs created by the src-release.sh script

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>]

On 29.09.2022 14:24, Nick Clifton via Binutils wrote:
> Thinking about this a little more last night, it occurred to me that if
> we want reproducible tarballs then we should not be storing user names,
> group names or modification times either. So what do you think about
> this extended version of the patch:
> 
> diff --git a/src-release.sh b/src-release.sh
> index 079b545ae7c..908492c28f7 100755
> --- a/src-release.sh
> +++ b/src-release.sh
> @@ -185,8 +185,8 @@ do_tar()
>       echo "==> Making $package-$ver.tar"
>       rm -f $package-$ver.tar
>       find $package-$ver -follow \( $CVS_NAMES \) -prune \
> -       -o -type f -print \
> -       | tar cTfh - $package-$ver.tar
> +       -o -type f -print | LC_ALL=C sort \
> +       | tar cTfh - $package-$ver.tar --mtime=0 --group=0 --owner=0
>   }

I wanted to indicate that an mtime of zero isn't the neatest, but the
two tar versions I've tried this with said anyway "Treating date '0' as
2022-09-29 00:00:00". A non-zero date with a time of zero is fine with
me, but won't make much of a difference in terms of reproducibility.

Jan