[ISSUE] Rewrite mtime of files in packages to the distfile's mtime

[ISSUE] Rewrite mtime of files in packages to the distfile's mtime

[paper42]

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New issue by paper42 on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/40963

Description:
Previously in 2016, mtime was always set to the date of the last commit in the package: 16050ad3f292306b0421ee6133b174db3f1b227d
Then in 2018 this mtime was changed to always be set to the date of HEAD because getting the time of the last package change from history was taking too long: a4a229cf6428ecca04d50369d010e028414590e5

This approach doesn't really work well for reproducibility because when HEAD moves, even that commit is unrelated, the whole package gets different timestamps which results in a seemingly random difference when someone merged an old commit to master. This way the mtime can also go backwards on user's systems which can be confusing.

I propose to change this mtime to the mtime of the first distfile and encourage packagers to make sure the first distfile is from the main project if there is more than one. That way the files in the resulting package have a predictable mtime that is also the date of the upstream release.

Re: Rewrite mtime of files in packages to the distfile's mtime

[paper42]

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New comment by paper42 on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/40963#issuecomment-1345979452

Comment:
mtime is currently set to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH which has to be available when evaluating the template - before do_fetch, so setting it to the distfiles mtime won't work.

Re: Rewrite mtime of files in packages to the distfile's mtime

[github-actions]

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New comment by github-actions[bot] on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/40963#issuecomment-1465391904

Comment:
Issues become stale 90 days after last activity and are closed 14 days after that.  If this issue is still relevant bump it or assign it.