[Issue]: Firewall decision files have dates like `00-00-1980 00:00`

[jsoref]

Repository

check-spelling-sandbox/check-spelling

Workflow run URL

https://github.com/check-spelling-sandbox/check-spelling/actions/runs/28179443063

Adoption path

Firewall enabled label for standard runners (ubuntu-24.04-firewall)

What happened?

  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
    20122  00-00-1980 00:00   firewall-decisions-Flaky Dictionaries-83464725515.json

What did you expect to happen?

Datestamps should be from approximately when the firewall activity completed, not approximately posix 0.

Steps to reproduce

1. Download a firewall artifact

2. Examine the artifact

3. List the contents of the archive

   $ unzip -l firewall-decisions-Flaky\ Dictionaries-83464725515.zip 
   Archive:  firewall-decisions-Flaky Dictionaries-83464725515.zip
     Length      Date    Time    Name
   ---------  ---------- -----   ----
       20122  00-00-1980 00:00   firewall-decisions-Flaky Dictionaries-83464725515.json

Additional context

No response

[Steve-Glass]

You noted the datestamps should be "from approximately when the firewall activity completed." To make sure we understand the expectation: are you looking for the timestamp to reflect the exact moment the firewall decision was made/completed, or would the time the artifact was zipped/uploaded meet your needs? These can differ, so we'd like to understand which one matters for your use case. Also what are your thoughts on UTC vs. Local time?

[jsoref]

My preference is for UTC. I don't want to have to deal w/ timezones moving around (one vendor for some reason is using BST!), and given that Azure could easily be hosting GitHub in EST/EDT or PST/PDT, that's just a lot of math I don't need.

If my computer extracts from UTC, I expect it to show the file listing in local time when I use my file listing tool, but that's because I expect my file listing tool to honor my preference, not because I'm directly inspecting the zip file and trying to do timezone math.

--

My needs are minimal, I'd be quite happy with the stamp being when you wrote out the log. Or if for some reason you can't manage to make it when you wrote out the log, then when you're assembling the zip file.

It sounds like you're constructing the zip by hand as opposed to generating it from a file on disk, so, yes, the timestamp of assembling the zip is fine.

In theory the timestamp of when you retrieved the firewall log would be preferable to the time you wrote it into the zip file, but I can't imagine it being hours different.