Re: Add set_* functions to stat-time?

[Collin Funk]

Hi Bruno,

On 3/17/24 2:03 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
>     The European GDPR asks for minimizing the collection of data that is
>     necessary for the job. mtime is necessary for transporting a package
>     to a different machine. Even atime is not. But ctime and creationtime
>     are not either, even less.

I see, thanks for mentioning that. I should really get around to
reading the GDPR... For what it's worth, I don't see much benefit to
saving the creation time. But like you said, some may have a different
preference.

>   * On Linux, it's not even possible to set the birthtime of a file, if
>     that is meant to mean the ctime (change time).

Yes, I beleive it is a BSD thing that MacOS also supports (don't quote
me on that). Maybe there would be a way to make the warnings less
noisy by default?

$ tar -xf eclipse-inst-jre-linux64.tar.gz  2>&1 | wc -l 
869

You can silence it like this, but at that point you have already
extracted the archive. :)

$ tar --warning=no-unknown-keyword -xf eclipse-inst-jre-linux64.tar.gz

It seems that 'bsdtar' will create archives with this by default
unless invoked with '--no-xattrs', but I don't have any way of double
checking at the moment.

Collin