Re: [Bug-tar] Tar 1.27 has become non-deterministic

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 21:31:29 +0200, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> +  header = start_private_header ("././@LongLink", size, (time_t)-1);

This patch works to produce unchanging tar archives in my test case
here (on Linux).

I was curious if you had a particular reason to use "-1" instead of "0"
here?  When time_t is signed, start_private_header will use
"00000000000" for the mtime field in either case, but if there are
systems with unsigned time_t will "-1" still do "the right thing"?



(For what it's worth, with [just] this patch, David's scripts will still
detect "phantom" changes in the archives when he first moves from 1.26
to 1.27, due to the change in the umask field values for these LongLink
entries.)

                                                Nathan

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