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

[Holger Levsen]

Hi Ximin,

sorry for the late reply, I hoped someone else would have replied ealier and 
with more substance than mine.

On Montag, 30. März 2015, Ximin Luo wrote:
> 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

I think you should document the idea in the wiki, even if I don't like the 
idea of using faketime very much. (Though maybe it is the best interim 
solution we have atm..)

I guess using 
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/TimestampsGeneratedByDocbookToMan 
would be not be the right place as your approach is aimed at more issues.


cheers,
	Holger
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 828 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/reproducible-builds/attachments/20150418/20f99fc1/attachment.sig>