This issue was originally brought up by Jeremy Lewi in this discussion on the bazel forums: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bazel-discuss/cprd0UhRMAs

Having the old timestamp creates issues with tools like python's distutils. E.g. - doing python setup.py install on the contents of a tarball made by Bazel will fail with zip complaining that it doesn't support timestamps before 1980.

Would it be possible to have a way to change the timestamp from the pkg_tar rule? Something like Kamal Marhubi's suggestion from the discussion would be great.