flaky CI macos: stat reports year 1677

[BenWiederhake]

Our MacOS CI seems to have developed a new flaky test. At first glance it looks like invalid (uninitialized?) memory got interpreted as a (negative? constant?) datetime, excessively far in the past (year 1677).

failures:

---- test_stat::test_symlinks stdout ----
---- test_stat::test_symlinks stderr ----


failures:
    test_stat::test_symlinks

test result: FAILED. 0 passed; 1 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 3276 filtered out; finished in 0.42s


--- TRY 3 STDERR:        coreutils::tests test_stat::test_symlinks ---
thread 'main' panicked at tests/by-util/test_stat.rs:160:46:
assertion failed: `(left == right)`

Diff < left / right > :
<644 -rw-r--r-- 8 512 16777232 1000010 81a4 regular file 0 wheel 1 190683 / /etc/localtime 4096 114 0 root 1970-01-01 00:00:00.000000000 +0000 -9223372036 2163-07-19 13:09:58.799152000 +0000 6107749798 2024-05-14 22:35:48.350259563 +0000 1715726148
>644 -rw-r--r-- 8 512 16777232 1000010 81a4 regular file 0 wheel 1 190683 / /etc/localtime 4096 114 0 root 1677-09-21 00:12:43.145224192 +0000 -9223372037 2163-07-19 13:09:58.799152000 +0000 6107749798 2024-05-14 22:35:48.350259563 +0000 1715726148

This seems to happen very often, at least these PRs: #6390 (comment) #6418

[cakebaker]

Closing this ticket as the issue no longer shows up.