How to create a tar file that omits timestamps for its contents?

Question

Is there a way to create a .tar file that omits the values of atime/ctime/mtime for its files/directories?

Why do we want to do this?

We have a st

Answer 1

To have a truly idempotent tar, mtime is a good step but not enough. You also need to set the sort order, the owner and group (together with their mapping) and a proper timezone for mtime (since otherwise you're gonna have issues as well between Mac and Linux).

I ended up with

tar --sort=name --owner=root:0 --group=root:0 --mtime='UTC 2019-01-01' ... | gzip -n