Re: [BuildStream] Proposal: bst artifact subcommand group

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Tue, 2018-07-24 at 13:51 +0100, Paul Sherwood via Buildstream-list wrote:
> On 2018-07-24 11:48, Tristan Van Berkom via Buildstream-list wrote:
> <snip>
> > It was recently raised that we cannot determine the build date of an
> > existing artifact either[1], as it's not a part of artifact metadata,
> > this discussion evolved to proposing that we have a subgroup of CLI
> > commands for dealing with specific artifacts.
>
> Perhaps a dumb question, but why isn't creation date of the artifact 
> file/archive good enough?

POSIX systems do not generally support creation/birth time metadata for
files, only modification, status change, and access times.

> > As such I'd like to propose the following, probably uncontroversial
> > enhancements:
> >
> >   o Add the build date to the artifact metadata, as a timezone neutral
> >     unix timestamp (seconds since epoch in UTC).

For text-based formats such as artifact metadata, I would rather
recommend RFC 3339 (ISO8601-based).

Jürg