The POSIX spec says:
If the −t option is used with the −v option, the standard output format shall be: "%s %u/%u %u %s %d %d:%d %d %s\n", <member mode>, <user ID>, <group ID>, <number of bytes in member>, <abbreviated month>, <day-of-month>, <hour>, <minute>, <year>, <file> where: ... <abbreviated month> Equivalent to the format of the %b conversion specification format in date. <day-of-month> Equivalent to the format of the %e conversion specification format in date. <hour> Equivalent to the format of the %H conversion specification format in date. <minute> Equivalent to the format of the %M conversion specification format in date. <year> Equivalent to the format of the %Y conversion specification format in date.
This actually used to be the format printed by llvm-ar. It was apparently accidentally changed (see r207385 followed by comments in r207387). This makes it conform to GNU ar for easier replacement.
LG.
The format specifier is what FreeBSD ar uses.
http://src.illumos.org/source/xref/freebsd-head/usr.bin/ar/read.c#145
An interesting finding is that GNU ar (binutils-gdb/binutils/bucomm.c) uses ctime in a horrible way: