Re: [Help-tar] --deterministic option?

[Paul Eggert]

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.