[Reproducible-builds] Bug#780259: perl: please make the output of Pod::Man reproducible

[Russ Allbery]

Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:

> A downside of this is that POD_MAN_DATE will affect all the manual pages
> generated by Pod::Man and remove the potentially useful indications of
> their recency. I can't really see how to avoid that, but possibly we
> should set POD_MAN_DATE to something that isn't really a timestamp at
> all, so as not to mislead readers. Given the check for a true value in
> devise_date(), an empty string isn't an option, but a space or 'N/A'
> come to mind.

Oh, ugh, I'm sorry.  Both of the relevant truth checks should just be
defined(); that's a bug.  It's entirely valid to want to omit that heading
entirely, and --date '' or POD_MAN_DATE='' should do the right thing.  (As
should --date 0, for that matter.)  I'll fix that in the next upstream
release.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>