[Reproducible-builds] Create tar archive with deterministic file order

[Reiner Herrmann]

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Hi Steven,

On 02/14/2015 09:44 PM, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
> What would be a preferred way to build a tar archive with deterministic
> file order?
> 
> Firstly let me point out that:
> 
> $ find foo/ -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 tar -cvf foo.tar
> 
> is risky as the list of filenames could overflow what xargs can supply
> to a single invocation of tar.  In that case it would invoke tar again
> and clobber the previous output.
[...]
> Finally I ended up with this:
> 
> $ find foo/ -type f -print0 > filelist
> $ tar -Jcvf foo.tar.xz -T filelist --null
> 
> Does that seem like the neatest way, or do you have better suggestions?

In the wiki [1] we currently have the following solution, which is similar to yours:
# find src -print0 | LC_ALL=C sort -z | tar --null -T - --no-recursion -cf archive.tar

Setting LC_ALL is required as there could be a different sorting order depending on the
locale.

Regards,
 Reiner

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/FileOrderInTarballs

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