[issue24465] Make tar files created by shutil.make_archive() have deterministic sorting

[Sam Thursfield]

New submission from Sam Thursfield:

I want shutil.make_archive() to produce deterministic output when given identical data as inputs.

Right now there are two holes in this. One is that mtimes might not match. This can be fixed by the caller. The second is that the order that files in a subdirectory get added to the tarfile is not deterministic. This can't be fixed by the caller.

Attached is a trivial patch to sort the results of os.listdir() to ensure the output tarfile is stable.

This only applies to the 'tar' format.

I've attached my testcase for this, which creates 3 tarfiles in /tmp. When this patch is applied, the 3 tarfiles it creates are identical according to `sha1sum`. Without this patch, they are all different.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
files: tar-reproducible-testcase.py
messages: 245464
nosy: samthursfield
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Make tar files created by shutil.make_archive() have deterministic sorting
type: enhancement
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file39727/tar-reproducible-testcase.py

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