>>>>> On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> Due to insufficient clarity in the proposal, the PMS team hasn't
> been able to come up with a wording that wouldn't either require
> changes to Portage (which appears to be against the Council's
> intent) or that would permit behaviour currently seen as
> undesirable. As I understand it, the issues are:

> * What's to be done about sub-second timestamps? What about cases
>   where the build filesystem supports them but the root filesystem
>   doesn't?

Obviously we cannot guarantee anything below the seconds level because
of limitations in the underlying filesystems or software (e.g., tar
for binpkgs). But is there a reason for limiting it further, i.e. not
preserving sub-second timestamps if they are supported by both
filesystems?

> * For which files must mtimes be preserved, and which can be modified?

> * Is it the intent of this proposal to prevent package managers from
>   automatically rewriting, say, #!/usr/bin/python to
>   #!/opt/gentoo/bin/python if prefix is being used?

Part of the problem (what you call "insufficient clarity") is that the
proposal's original intention was to cover only the merge process,
i.e. what takes place after pkg_preinst. Whereas you want to extend it
to include everything that is taking place after src_install (for
Portage, prepstrip and whatnot).

If you limit it to the final merge process from D to ROOT, then the
answer is easy, namely mtimes of all regular files must be preserved.

Ulrich