[Reproducible-builds] General plan for reproducible timestamps in documentation

[Ximin Luo]

TL;DR: see https://gitweb.torproject.org/debian/flashproxy.git/diff/?id=92add337b86303a1&id2=8f7d498ac729086c^

The idea:

1. We have dh (and/or other tools) set a standard environment variable, SOURCEDATE, according to the package's changelog
2. We create wrappers that use "faketime -f" to run various documentation generators. During the build, we set PATH to include these wrappers.
3. We try to persuade upstream to support SOURCEDATE. As they add this support, we can remove the corresponding wrapper.

Pros:
- *at most* 2-line change for package maintainers, or possibly even no changes if dh/cdbs is good
- works even if upstream is stubborn or uncooperative
- we selectively use faketime only for specific tools (doc generators) that don't have a problem with it
- actually we could generalise this to any tool that works with faketime, not just doc generators

Cons:
- I can't think of any, but I guess this mailing list will find some. :)

X

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