[cfarm-users] Migration of gcc119

[Bruno Haible]

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> If you bundle something up on a system that's (say) 12 hours ahead of the
> target system and unpack it there, many of the files will have dates up to 12
> hours in the future, messing up the build process.  So time zones do matter.

If time zones do matter, either your packing program or your unpacking program
is buggy.

It is possible to design archive formats, archivers, and unarchivers in
such a way that after packing, transferring to a different machine, and
unpacking the time stamps are the same as they were on the original
machine (considering time zone differences) [1]. Therefore this is considered
correct program behaviour, and programs that behave like you describe them
are considered buggy.

GNU tar is correct, just to name one such archiver.

Bruno

[1] The "magic trick" is to use UTC.