Subject: Re: Sources for 3.18-rc1 not uploaded

From: Konstantin Ryabitsev <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:44:09 -0400

On 20/10/14 06:28 PM, brian m. carlson wrote:
>> Junio, quite frankly, I don't think that that fix was a good idea. I'd
>> > suggest having a *separate* umask for the pax headers, so that we do
>> > not  break this long-lasting stability of "git archive" output in ways
>> > that are unfixable and not compatible. kernel.org has relied (for a
>> > *long* time) on being able to just upload the signature of the
>> > resulting tar-file, because both sides can generate the same tar-fiel
>> > bit-for-bit.
> It sounds like kernel.org has a bug, then.  Perhaps that's the
> appropriate place to fix the issue.

It's not a bug, it's a feature (TM). KUP relies on git-archive's ability
to create identical tar archives across platforms and versions. The
benefit is that Linus or Greg can create a detached PGP signature
against a tarball created from "git archive [tag]" on their system, and
just tell kup to create the same archive remotely, thus saving them the
trouble of uploading 80Mb each time they cut a release.

With their frequent travel to places where upload bandwidth is both slow
and unreliable, this ability to not have to upload hundreds of Mbs each
time they cut a release is very handy and certainly helps keep kernel
releases on schedule.

So, while it's fair to point out that git-archive was never intended to
always create bit-for-bit identical outputs, it would be *very nice* if
this remained in place, as at least one large-ish deployment (us) finds
it really handy.

-K