Can Ansible unarchive be made to write static folder modification times?

Rather than overwriting all files each time and find a way to keep the same modification datetime, you may want to use the creates option of the unarchive module.

As you maybe already know, this tells Ansible that a specific file/folder will be created as a result of the task. Thus, next time the task will not be run again if that file/folder already exists.

See http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/unarchive_module.html#options

My solution is to modify the checksum script and to make that a permanent feature of the Ansible process. It feels a bit hacky to do my own checksumming, when Ansible should do it for me, but it works.

New answers that explain that I am doing something wrong, or that a new version of Ansible fixes the problem, would be most welcome.

If I get a moment, I will raise this as a possible bug with the Ansible team. However I do sometimes wonder about the effort/reward ratio when raising bugs on a busy tracker - I already have one item outstanding, it has been waiting a while, and I've chosen to work around that too.

Update (18 months later)

This Ansible build system never made it into live. It felt like I was always working around something. Recently, when I decided I needed to move my blog to another server, I finally Dockerised it. This took several weeks (since there is a surprising amount of things to think about in a real WordPress installation) but in general I found the process much nicer than using orchestration tools.