Major Description
Currently with ANT Tasks it is not possible to fully control the way Zip, Jar, Ear, or War files are produced. The issue is that the default behavior of the task includes the last modified date information from the file system when in creates an archive. The result is that with the exact same source code the archive produced from any given build will vary based on where and when the build was run. In an environment like HUDSON where you wish to build on different servers, from different branches, and at different times this is problematic since the MD5 hash value of the artifact the build produces will not reflect the content of the code but rather reflect a combination of the content of the code and the current time of the server where the build was run.
ANT should support an option for the task to define the last modified date of the archive. If support for this option is added to the Zip task then it will be automatically available in tasks that extend it.
The patch file attached to this issue provides an implementation of the last modified attribute and can be applied to SVN revision 784603 of Zip.java.
