Jonas Witschel authored Mar 10, 2022 and Allan McRae committed Oct 02, 2022

bsdtar uses the "pax" TAR archive format by default, which has support for
storing sparse file information in the archive. Unfortunately this is a source
of unreproducibility because the sparse encoding is taken from the file system
and different file systems handle sparse files differently: some file systems
have no support for sparsely encoded files at all, and even file systems with
sparse file support can report different file information for identical files
due to differing implementations.

As a real world example where this happens, consider the Arch Linux package
"brotli-testdata 1.0.9-7", which contains a sparsely encoded all-zeros file
"usr/share/brotli/testdata/zeros". Building this package on a btrfs file system
yields a different package than building it on tmpfs or ext4 solely due to
different sparse file information that gets recorded in the package tarball.

To improve the reproducibility of archives containing sparsely encoded files,
libarchive version 3.6.0 introduces a new --no-read-sparse option. This skips
reading sparse file information from disk entirely and therefore stores files
"expanded" in the archive, which is the only way to make them reliably
reproducible across file systems.

makepkg will use this option if libarchive is recent enough to support it,
which is detected at build time.

Signed-off-by: Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>
(cherry picked from commit f5f9e0f4)