Re: ar "zero" flag

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 03:04:48PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
 > > Several people, including cgd, have independently suggested that a
 > > flag to ar that said "zeroize the time, uid, etc., on packing" would
 > > be appropriate.
 > 
 > I don't like it as it removes any knowledge when a file was build.
 > It doesn't matter for updates as long as the content didn't change, but
 > removing it completely is bad.

I don't think I've ever run into a reason to care about the timestamps
of the innards of .a files. For that matter, while the ar -u
functionality was vaguely useful fifteen years ago as a performance
hack, maybe, getting rid of it entirely (that is, make ar -cru the
same as rm and ar -cq) wouldn't hurt anything.

I'd actually be inclined to set the timestamp to 0xdeadbeef, not 0,
and shoot anything that notices, but that's probably a bit too
aggressive.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost