Can files compressed with bzip2 be relied upon to be deterministic (reproducible)?
8
votes
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answer
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I am trying to determine if there are any potential issues using
bzip2
to compress files that need to be 100% reproducible. Specifically: can metadata (name / inode, lastmod date, etc) or anything else cause identical file contents to **produce a different checksum** on the resulting .bz2
archive?
As an example, gzip is not by default deterministic unless -n
is used.
My crude tests so far suggest that bzip2 does indeed consistently produce identical files given identical input data (regardless of metadata, platform, filesystem, etc), but it would be nice to have more than anecdotal evidence.
Asked by Jonathan Cross
(258 rep)
Jul 22, 2019, 12:14 PM
Last activity: Jul 22, 2019, 01:52 PM
Last activity: Jul 22, 2019, 01:52 PM