Binary diffs for deb files

[James Hall]

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 17:16 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 01:13:05AM +0100, James Hall wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 17:04 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > > Where are you getting the correct timestamps for the new versions of
> > > control.tar and data.tar?  Does bsdiff/bspatch preserve those for you?
> > 
> > control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz have their timestamp preserved when
> > decompressed and bsdiff/bspatch simply leaves it alone.
> 
> The timestamps won't be the same for different versions of the .deb.
> 
> -- 
>  - mdz
> 

Ahh, I see what you mean. The timestamps inside the deb are preserved,
and the checksum is the same, so that's half the battle. 

I made a signature for the original deb, and it verified against the
patched one, despite it having a different timestamp. 

How important is having the correct timestamp on the resulting file?