RFC: svn for make fetch

[Eitan Adler]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Scot Hetzel <swhetzel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Eitan Adler <eitanadlerlist at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Actually, I *had* a patch that got the source from svn, tarred it
>>> and checksummed it, with little modification to the do-fetch target
>>> and abusing FETCH_* variables.
>>> The unsolvable problem I ran in to, is that svn doesn't adjust
>>> timestamps for directories on export, so the checksum for the tar
>>> was always different. Hacking svn export was outside my timeframe
>>> and hacking tar to grow an option that sets all created dirs to
>>> a fixed time stamp, seemed too hackish, so I let it go.
>>
>> Creating deterministic tars (ignoring "metadeta") sounds like it
>> should be a solved problem by now. If it isn't then I will have to
>> make it my next project ;)
>>
> Instead of creating tar files, create zip files and then run them
> through torrentzip
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/archivers/torrentzip/
>
> Torrentzip resets the date/time on the files and directories in the
> zip archive so that the checksum of the file will match, no matter who
> builds the zip file using the same set of files.
>
> Scot
>

Does such a tool exist for tar archives?