Possible file date related bug in modern GNU tar?

[Peter Dyballa]

Hello!

The Apple supplied versions of /usr/bin/gnutar in PPC Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4.11) 
and PPC Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.8), 1.14 resp. 1.15.1, show since some time 
warnings like this

        /usr/bin/gnutar: meson-0.55.3/COPYING: implausibly old time stamp 
1970-01-01 01:00:00

that I noticed recently when untarring an archive (meson-0.55.3.tar.gz in this 
case, but there is about a dozen more TAR files that show this). These 
"implausibly old time stamps" are also preserved by using means like Python's 
pip installer.

Is it likely that some modern version of GNU tar has introduced a bug when 
creating an archive? On *some* OS? Or is it more likely that my two old Mac OS 
X versions have a bug? GNU find 4.7.0 and some Netbsd /usr/bin/find (1.7.6.3 
from "2001/05/06") find both the same ≈ 4.000 files from 1976-04-01 and ≈ 2.000 
files from 1970-01-01 on both systems…

Of course up-to-date GNU tar 1.32 shows a reasonable date '2020-08-15 18:27'.

--
Greetings

  Pete

A monsoon is a French gentleman.