> I suppose that means e.g. for Git's own repo that
> Tito would allow creating a separate RPM file for e.g. git-gui.
Indeed, that pretty much sums the main idea of why they need sub 
directories there. Ideally we don't want different special cases, and 
instead use as much native behaviour as possible. The main issue here is 
just making it work with `export-subst`, and if it can be achieved with 
both `strip-components` and `prefix`, that might work, even though 
`--transform` would be more flexible.

> However we cannot use the `tar` directly because that would affect
> the timestamps and permissions of the file that are set by `git
> archive`.
I should have explained more thoroughly, I have tried to work around by 
doing a `git archive` and then extracting and re-compressing after 
fixing the paths, but this does not preserve the owner and timestamp of 
the original `git archive`, nor can I use the current implementation of 
their tar fixer to correct these since the headers are different. I do 
not have enough expertise to know what headers need to be set, how to 
set the timestamps and so on. I don't know if the `gzip -n -c` could do 
a better job at that, but we would still not be able to use it as is 
because we would want the correctly generate `export-subst` files, for 
example for a project built with `setuptools_scm` that injects the 
version of the python package from the last tag:

https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm#git-archives

> There it was introduced along with a script that changes the mtime
> of archive entries from the current time to the commit timestamp by
> https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/commit/34267e39d472.
Thanks for pointing me to this. From your understanding, if we only use 
the git commit directly, we would in principle not need the whole tar 
fixer 
(https://github.com/rpm-software-management/tito/blob/91ef962220ec5154722760dbbd982bed032ee484/src/tito/tar.py#L28-L60 
and 
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/tito/blob/91ef962220ec5154722760dbbd982bed032ee484/src/tito/common.py#L871-L890)? 
If there is no crucial information in the header that is different 
between the `git archive` and the `tar`/`gzip` with appropriate `mtime`, 
`mode` and maybe others, maybe there is some hope in fixing this locally.

I'll be looking forward to `--strip-components`, but just to confirm my 
reading of the email, the intent is to have it working with 
`export-subst` right?

Cheers and thanks for your intuitive answers.