[Reproducible-builds] Bug#787444: help2man: support externally-supplied --date for reproducibility

[Ximin Luo]

On 04/06/15 16:19, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>>> If the build system is going to set environment variables, maybe it
>>> could set an environment variable with a parseable date string
>>> (ISO-8601?) and help2man could look at that environment variable and
>>> extract a string from it?  (ideally this extraction step would be
>>> TZ-independent, too)
>>
>> That would also work, and if your reproducible build environment was
>> to pull the changelog date and stick it into an environment variable,
>> then you should only need to patch the tools rather than the Makefile
>> of every package which uses them.
>>
>> At worst, for the tools you can't patch, you're in the same place you
>> are now--having to patch all the Makefiles, and even that is perhaps
>> easier as you already have the date:
>>
>>   --date=${DEB_BUILD_CHANGELOG_DATE:-$(date --iso-8601=seconds)}
> 
> Yep, i think this makes sense; reproducible-build folks -- do we want to
> take this tack with help2man?  If so, what would the environment
> variable be named?  what would its contents be?
> 

Hi,

A few months ago I had an idea for this that would be more generalisable. See

https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/reproducible-builds/Week-of-Mon-20150330/001317.html

for details. TL;DR is to have SOURCEDATE as an environment variable in ISO8601 format.

It would be awesome for help2man to support this. At some point, debhelper can even set this environment variable automatically.

X

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