Description of problem: IMO, embedding the source file name and mtime in the compressed file (--name) is a misfeature. The extra metadata has never been useful to me, but it broke reproducibility of one of my build processes until I disabled it. Please consider disabling it (--no-name) by default, or at least when stdin is a pipe. I realize this request could probably go upstream, but upstream bug tracking is nonexistent. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gzip-1.3.13-4.fc13.x86_64 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: echo foo | gzip | sha1sum; sleep 1; echo foo | gzip | sha1sum Actual results: Two different values. Expected results: The same value twice.
Created attachment 434453 [details] Proposed patch It makes sense to me to disable the file name and mtime by default when reading the input from stdin. Not sure about changing the defaults for files. I'll ask the upstream author.
The upstream thinks it's bad to make pipes a special case. Feel free to make a better proposal there, I should have thought mine more. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2010-08/msg00001.html