Bug#822427: pristine-tar: should create reproducible deltas
Package: pristine-tar
Version: 1.33
Severity: normal
Hi,
pristine-tar gendelta tarball.tar.gz delta1
pristine-tar gendelta tarball.tar.gz delta2
produces two different deltas, mainly due to different timestamps.
It would be great, if pristine-tar could take this into account and
create more easily reproducible deltas.
One would be to use gzip -n to omit the timestamp when compressing the
delta data.
Another problem are the timestamps inside the (delta) tarball.
The input tarball should have enough sources to provide a usable
timestamp:
* the gzip timestamp (unless created with gzip -n)
* the modification time of the newest file/directory inside the tarball
(the filesystem timestamp of that tarball is not a usable option)
With a recent tar, there is a --mtime option that could be used while
creating the delta tarball.
Andreas
PS: hmm, using pristine-tar again on the delta it created ... no I'm not
going to explore this idea :-)
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