[Debian-med-packaging] Differences in repackaged tarballs (Was: libsbml_5.4.1-2_amd64.changes REJECTED)

[Thorsten Alteholz]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Andreas Tille wrote:
> After having read
>
>   http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/01/msg00378.html
>
> I do not consider it strange any more.  The changed timestamp of
> directories makes a valid point here.

This article is about pristine tar and I have to admit that I know almost 
nothing about this.

I am just wondering why a simple unzip and tar/gzip should not always give 
the same result.
- After I zip and unzip something, both directories are identical, so
   here are good default values that preserve everything.
- If I tar a directory several times, the resulting tar files are
   different. There is an information in the tar header about the last
   modification of the tar file.
   This is bad in our case and can be avoided by setting a well defined
   modification time  => --mtime 0
- Almost the same is valid for gzip and can be avoided with --no-name

So your line might look like:

>   GZIP="--best --no-name" tar --mtime 0 --owner=root --group=root \
>                                --mode=a+rX -czf ...

and everything should be fine, right?

   Thorsten