Packaging Guidelines - creating tarball from VCS with script

[Alec Leamas]

On 05/14/2012 10:46 PM, Thomas Moschny wrote:
> 2012/5/14 Toshio Kuratomi<a.badger at gmail.com>:
>> Automating of the package's checksum won't work for many VCS's .  git, for
>> instance, does not preserve timestamps.  So the tarball created from a git
>> snapshot will have a different checksum for each checkout.
> While files' modification times in a checkout may be different,
> archives created with 'git archive' are stable, because git uses the
> datetime of the commit for each file in the archive.
>
> So instead of cloning the repository and creating the archive locally,
> the preferred method would imho be to use a download link (if present)
> of the used git hosting service for directly preparing an archive, and
> to file bugs for the respective hosting service if they do not
> properly use this git functionality.
>
> - Thomas
I don't find the reference right here, but of the top of my head git 
changes modification times when checking out a branch, but keeps it when 
checking out a commit. But the real problem is the hosting services, and 
while we certainly can file bugs on github or gitorious, we also have to 
live with them.

We just had a thread on the github tarballs with the unreasonable names 
like 1234fcd; no extension... modification time is not the only problem