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Description of problem:

When I install Atomic Host, some files have mtime set to 1970-01-01 UTC, for example /etc/ssh/ssh_config or /etc/pam.d/sshd.

Full list can be found using

find / ! -mnewer /etc/ssh/ssh_config

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

# cat /etc/redhat-release 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host release 7.1
# rpm-ostree status
  TIMESTAMP (UTC)         VERSION     ID             OSNAME          REFSPEC                                            
* 2015-06-06 12:53:05     7.1.574     d1c0d69c20     atomic-host     atomic-host:rhel-atomic-host/7/x86_64/standard     

How reproducible:

Deterministic.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run # export TZ=UTC ; tar cf - /etc/ssh/ssh_config /etc/pam.d/sshd | ( cd /tmp && tar xvf - )

Actual results:

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
etc/ssh/ssh_config
tar: etc/ssh/ssh_config: implausibly old time stamp 1970-01-01 00:00:00
etc/pam.d/sshd
tar: etc/pam.d/sshd: implausibly old time stamp 1970-01-01 00:00:00

Expected results:

No warnings, mtime not set to epoch.

Additional info:

That's expected, OSTree intentionally does not carry file timestamps.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/ostree-list/2015-February/msg00008.html
https://git.gnome.org/browse/ostree/commit/?id=fe5ed36461a52b38cb366162bfd222ad3b326bf2

It's unfortunate that tar complains, but we'll just have to live with it.

Although we *could* set file timestamps to be newer for the copies of files in /etc...I'll file a bug to look at that.

*** Bug 1186411 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Should this bug be closed?

This was incidentally fixed a while ago for files, and tar no longer warns.  But directories still have 0 timestamps.

Filed that here https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/995

There's a PR for this upstream; I don't think it's worth tracking this here too.  The fix will make its way downstream soon enough.