Hello hackers, I got reminded of a problem I had a couple of years back compressing FreeBSD jails. I was using bsdiff for the compression and found out that md5 sums of static libraries (.a files) in /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib didn't match between jails, even though the source code used to create the jails hadn't changed. One of my goals is to detect which files in a distribution change between two commits.
It turns out that timestamps are stored in the library: # strings DIR1/usr/lib/libfetch.a > tmp1 # strings DIR2/usr/lib/libfetch.a > tmp2 # diff tmp1 tmp2 2c2 < / 1200728973 0 0 0 954 ` --- > / 1200723259 0 0 0 954 ` 57c57 < file.o/ 1200728973 0 0 100644 2356 ` --- > file.o/ 1200723259 0 0 100644 2356 ` 86c86 < http.o/ 1200728973 0 0 100644 17180 ` --- > http.o/ 1200723258 0 0 100644 17180 ` [...] I'm wondering if this is necessary, or if this can possibly be turned of with a knob somewhere. Thanks, Erik
