alt Hacker News> Why should I throw away all the timestamps, just because the file were temporarily in an archive?
In case anyone is unaware, you don't have to throw away all the timestamps when using "zip with no compression". The metadata for each zipped file includes one timestamp (originally rounded to even number of seconds in local time).
I am a big last modified timestamp fan and am often discouraged that scp, git, and even many zip utilities are not (at least by default).
git updates timestamps in part by necessity of compatibility with build systems. If it applied the timestamp of when the file was last modified on checkout then most build systems would break if you checked out an older commit.