[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=0 not clamping file mtime (Issue #2679)

[Colin Walters]

ostree always uses zero for mtime of files it writes because there are no timestamps in the file format at all.  And in order to have sharing via hardlinks, there's then the question of what time to apply to that inode.

If there was a way in a Unix filesystem to have no timestamp at all, we'd definitely do that!  In Rust terms, ideally `stat()` would return `Option<time_t>`.

Longer term though, we're moving towards https://github.com/containers/composefs which will give us in-memory/on-disk sharing even if we just let file timestamps float to "whatever", which will be helpful here.  Also, it's likely in that world that we could consider switching to canonicalizing the on-disk (in EROFS) timestamp to e.g. something like the overall build's SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, which could definitely be non-zero.


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