[rb-general] Creating reproducible tar files

[Daniel Shahaf]

Eitan Adler wrote on Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 08:40:58 -0800:
> On 21 January 2017 at 08:21,  <anonmous at sigaint.org> wrote:
> > Please change the recommendation to use --owner=0 --group=0 instead of
> > --owner=root --group=root as the end goal is to achieve 0 anyway and root
> > may not always lead to 0:
> >
> > https://superuser.com/questions/877037/root-user-uid-got-changed
> >
> > Similarly using --owner=root --group=root --numeric-owner with tar.exe in
> > windows leads to non-zero ids while --owner=0 --group=0 --numeric-owner
> > leads to 0 ids.
> 
> Wouldn't it be better to recommend using an mtree file instead?

We could recommend both.  I wouldn't recommend mtree(1) *instead* of GNU
tar since neither of them is 100% portable.