Subject: Re: bug#44559:

From: Maxime Devos <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2021 19:32:34 +0100

Hi Guix,

On Fri, 2021-02-19 at 16:33 +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> [...]
> Longer-term, we need to find a way to address or avoid this issue.  A
> brute-force approach would be to have the build machines at ci.guix run
> with a clock ten years ahead.  That should generally be fine since the
> only place where timestamps matter are unmodified upstream tarballs.  In
> all other cases, mtime is set to 1.

Alternatively, could the build container be adjusted to always begin at
1970-01-01, using ‘time namespaces’?

Linux: https://lwn.net/Articles/766089/
Hurd analogue: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-doc/Host-Interface.html#Host-Interface

(Of course, someone needs to find the time to write the patches first.  Maybe
I'll have a try at it eventually, but probably not anytime soon.)

Also, is there any particular reason to set the clock only ten years ahead,
and not, say, a millenia or two?  Some possible reasons:

* year 2038,2446 problem: the ext2 and ext4 filesystems have a restricted
  date range
* year 2038 problem: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-doc/Host-Interface.html#Host-Interface

  IMO, the year 2038 problem is a bug and affected packages should simply be fixed.
  But perhaps reality is a little more complicated.

Greetings,
Maxime