Filesystems do not give any guarantees about ordering of files returned in directory listings, thus tarfile.add adds files in random order, when using os.listdir in recursion.

See also https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/stable-inputs/ on that topic.

The patch for similar issue with the glob module was rejected recently since it is easy to sort the result of glob.glob() (see issue30461). This issue looks similar, but there are differences. On one side, the command line tar utility doesn't have the option for sorting file names and seems don't sort them by default (I didn't checked). It is possible to use external sorting with the tarfile module as with the tar utility (generate the list of all files and directories, sort it, and pass every item to TarFile.add with the option recursive=False). But on other side, this is not so easy as for glob.glob(). And the overhead of the sorting is expected to be smaller than for glob.glob(). This may be considered as additional arguments for approving the patch.

If this approach will be approved, it should be applied also to the ZIP archives.

FYI the order of archived files can affect the compression ratio of the compressed tar archive. For example the 7-Zip archiver sorts files by extensions, this increases the chance that files of the same type (text, multimedia, spreadsheet, executables, etc) are grouped together and use the common dictionary for global compression. This isn't directly related to this issue, just a material for possible future enhancement.

note: recent GNU tar versions (1.28?) added an option --sort=name

and the overhead of sorting (e.g. I measured 4ms for 10000 files) is negligible compared to the other processing done on the files here.

Given the reproducible builds angle, I'd say this was worth doing.

+1 from me

In my opinion it's both a good idea to not sort the result of glob.glob() and make the order of tar and zip module content ordered. The glob module is low level and it makes sense to expose the file system sort order.

On the other hand tar and zip modules are on a higher level. Without sorting it's impossible to create reproducible archives. The performance impact is irrelevant. I/O and compression dominant performance.

PS: I'm -0 to backport the change to 3.6 and 2.7. 3.5 is in security fix mode and therefore completely out of scope.

Since we currently don't warranty *anything* about ordering, I like the idea of *fixing* Python 2.7 and 3.6 as well. +1 for fix it in 2.7, 3.6 and master.

Ah, I was just going to ask about that.  I guess I'm -0 on the backport as well.  The other reproducible build stuff is only going to land in 3.7. However, this is in a more general category than the pyc stuff, so I can see the argument for backporting it.

The only warranty in that TarFile.getmembers(), TarFile.getnames() and ZipFile.infolist() returns members/names "in the same order as the members in the archive".

Currently, there is no warranty when packing, only on unpack.

The patch changes behavior. It's fine for 3.7 but not for 3.6/2.7. Somebody may depend on filesystem order.

This doesn't seem appropriate to me for backporting to existing releases (3.6. and 2.7).  AFAIK, the current file-system-order behavior has never been identified as a bug.  Unless there is a stronger case for changing the existing 3.6.x behavior, I am -1 on backporting.

If make this change you need to make similar changes in other places that recursively add files to archives: shutil, zipapp, distutils, and maybe more.

I now agree to leave Python 2.7 and 3.6 unchanged.

We missed beta freeze deadline. :/

Ned,
can we get this change into beta 2? It's low risk change to make the tarballs and other archives have a stable sort order. We even considered to backport the change to 3.6 and 2.7.

New changeset 84521047e413d7d1150aaa1c333580b683b3f4b1 by Victor Stinner (Bernhard M. Wiedemann) in branch 'master':
bpo-30693: zip+tarfile: sort directory listing (#2263)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/84521047e413d7d1150aaa1c333580b683b3f4b1

> We missed beta freeze deadline. :/

I merged the PR. We will have to create a cherry-pick request once the 3.7 branch will be created. If Ned rejects it, we have to change the version number of documentation.

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-January/152012.html

IMHO the change is very safe to be merged into 3.7b2.

I requested additional changes in msg310337.

@Serhiy IMHO, just because we fix one problem, we do not have to fix all other problems at the same time. You can still open a pull-request for the others, but I know too little about those to test them.
And having commits pending for 7 months is not exactly energizing either.

For my use-case I just needed a trivial 1 line fix in tarfile.py and already ended up with a diffstat of
 7 files changed, 39 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

New changeset 57750be4ad3fa2cfd3473b5be1f1e1a5d0fa9f50 by Ned Deily (Bernhard M. Wiedemann) in branch '3.7':
bpo-30693: zip+tarfile: sort directory listing (#2263)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/57750be4ad3fa2cfd3473b5be1f1e1a5d0fa9f50

Tests are failing on Windows.

======================================================================
ERROR: test_ordered_recursion (test.test_tarfile.Bz2WriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\unittest\mock.py", line 1191, in patched
    return func(*args, **keywargs)
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1152, in test_ordered_recursion
    support.unlink(os.path.join(path, "1"))
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\support\__init__.py", line 394, in unlink
    _unlink(filename)
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\support\__init__.py", line 344, in _unlink
    _waitfor(os.unlink, filename)
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\support\__init__.py", line 341, in _waitfor
    RuntimeWarning, stacklevel=4)
RuntimeWarning: tests may fail, delete still pending for C:\py\cpython3.7\build\test_python_8504\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\directory\1

======================================================================
ERROR: test_directory_size (test.test_tarfile.GzipWriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1121, in test_directory_size
    os.mkdir(path)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\py\\cpython3.7\\build\\test_python_8504\\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\\directory'

======================================================================
ERROR: test_ordered_recursion (test.test_tarfile.GzipWriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\unittest\mock.py", line 1191, in patched
    return func(*args, **keywargs)
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1137, in test_ordered_recursion
    os.mkdir(path)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\py\\cpython3.7\\build\\test_python_8504\\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\\directory'

======================================================================
ERROR: test_directory_size (test.test_tarfile.LzmaWriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1121, in test_directory_size
    os.mkdir(path)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\py\\cpython3.7\\build\\test_python_8504\\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\\directory'

======================================================================
ERROR: test_ordered_recursion (test.test_tarfile.LzmaWriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\unittest\mock.py", line 1191, in patched
    return func(*args, **keywargs)
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1137, in test_ordered_recursion
    os.mkdir(path)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\py\\cpython3.7\\build\\test_python_8504\\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\\directory'

======================================================================
ERROR: test_directory_size (test.test_tarfile.WriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1121, in test_directory_size
    os.mkdir(path)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\py\\cpython3.7\\build\\test_python_8504\\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\\directory'

======================================================================
ERROR: test_ordered_recursion (test.test_tarfile.WriteTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\unittest\mock.py", line 1191, in patched
    return func(*args, **keywargs)
  File "C:\py\cpython3.7\lib\test\test_tarfile.py", line 1137, in test_ordered_recursion
    os.mkdir(path)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\py\\cpython3.7\\build\\test_python_8504\\@test_8504_tmp-tardir\\directory'

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Serhiy, can you test https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/5557

New changeset 4ad703b7ca463d1183539277dde90ffb1c808487 by Serhiy Storchaka (Bernhard M. Wiedemann) in branch 'master':
bpo-30693: Fix tarfile test cleanup on MSWindows (#5557)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/4ad703b7ca463d1183539277dde90ffb1c808487

New changeset 2c6f6682768f401c297c584ef106d48c78697f67 by Serhiy Storchaka (Miss Islington (bot)) in branch '3.7':
bpo-30693: Fix tarfile test cleanup on MSWindows (GH-5557) (GH-5567)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/2c6f6682768f401c297c584ef106d48c78697f67