Re: [PATCH 7/7] archive: provide builtin .tar.gz filter

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

No, I mean that people may _want_ the timestamp in day to day use. Using
"-n" all the time suppresses it. And there is no reason to suppress it,
except that our test does not account for it properly. So your patch is
hurting people who don't want "-n" (i.e., want the timestamp) just to
make our test happy.

It's useful to omit the timestamp outside of git too. Source-based package
management systems generally store a URL from which to fetch a source
tarball, and a hash of that source tarball to ensure it hasn't been tampered
with. It's nice to be able to use a gitweb URL like

  http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=snapshot;h=e5af0de202e885b793482d416b8ce9d50dd2b8bc;sf=tgz

as the tarball source, and still be able to verify its integrity against a
prestored hash.

Cheers,

Chris.