Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> writes: > On 1/29/25 13:42, Simon Josefsson wrote: >> I don't see what >> information is useful in a software release tarball that needs to go in >> there? > > The main bugaboo I see is AIX 'make', which says A is out of date if > it has the same timestamp as B. With ustar format timestamps have only > 1 s resolution so this could provoke unnecessary actions that might > cause a build to fail if the builder lacks some developer tools. With > posix format timestamps have 1 ns resolution so it's not a practical > problem. > > If you insist on GNU 'make' then this is also not a problem. Or if you > arrange for timestamps to be at least 1 s apart in this situation - > but if you're going to do that, you might as well use 1 s resolution > everywhere.
I don't think sub-1s timestamps are useful in release tarballs. My approach to avoid them right now is to hard code timestamps with 'tar --mtime' to last git commit time. This works fine on all platforms I test in CI/CD on. I'm about to release libtasn1 and we'll see if there are any reports about this. Maybe asking users to use gmake will be acceptable if the AIX/HPUX problem is common. /Simon
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