Re: [PATCH] archive: add --mtime

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 22, 2023, 19:51 UTC
Message-ID: <Y/ZyNNMFmafz8YvE@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqlekrh94h.fsf@gitster.g>

On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 09:37:18PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de> writes:
> 
> >> This is the solution with least damage, letting the existing code to
> >> set archive_time and then discard the result and overwrite with the
> >> command line option.
> >
> > I actually like Peff's solution more, because it's short and solves the
> > specific problem of non-deterministic timestamps for tree archives.
> 
> Yes.  That would be my preference as well.  Without any UI to
> educate users about.

My biggest concern with the patch I showed is that it gives no escape hatch if people don't like the change. Like I said earlier, I don't think anybody has grounds to complain about the byte-for-byte output hash changing, as it would be changing once per second. But they may complain about the cosmetic problem.

One "escape hatch" is to tell them to use "tar -m", but I don't know how friendly that is. The more obvious one at the Git level is to have "--current-mtime" or something to get the old behavior. But at that point, you may as well support "--mtime=now", which is the same amount of work, and much more flexible.

-Peff