On Fri, 24 Jan 2014, Masao Uebayashi wrote:
I agree that in an ideal reproducible world timestamp (== physical time and its order) has no value. But it is useful to detect "unnecessary rebuild" - reproducible but built repeatedly & unnecessarily. I see some value in it.
You could extract that from METALOG. If something is built twice, it will have two entries in METALOG, but only one entry in METALOG.sanitised.
Depending on the host platform, there might not be any timestamps in METALOG. On a NetBSD host, I see time= keywords in METALOG, but on a Linux host, I do not see them.
--apb (Alan Barrett)