Jakob Bohm wrote:
I would suggest (as a future feature) three new determinism options:
These all sound like nice suggestions. Getting back to the original request, the biggest problem I see with it is the issue of file timestamps. Unfortunately, --mtime=debian/changelog loses useful information in the distribution. Instead, I arrange for each repository-controlled file to have its repository-controlled timestamp. And I arrange to have each generated file's timestamp to equal that of its newest dependency. You can this sort of thing in the set-timestamps.out rule of <https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/Makefile>.
I don't think this can be easily folded into 'tar', but at least 'tar' should be able to do everything else you mention without munging timestamps.
