flatpak use of January 1st 1970 as date creates problems for KDE software

[Dan Nicholson]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 3:30 PM Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:
>
> I don't know much about flatpak, but can we make it so the date is not always January 1st 1970 but some of these?
>  * the date the flatpak was built
>  * the date the flatpak was installed

Using the epoch for the modification time for checked out files is
pretty deeply wired into how ostree and flatpak work. If this was
changed it would likely have many subtle knock on effects. Here's the
last time this was tried -
https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/pull/330.

It's possible that flatpak could override that at checkout time and
update the mtimes to the current time, but I imagine it would cause
unexpected issues. At the least it would likely cause any caches
embedded in the commit to be invalidated.

--
Dan