[Reproducible-builds] lua-ldoc --date/SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH

[Ximin Luo]

Alexis Bienvenüe:
> Hi.
> 
> lua-ldoc's maintainer added a --date option that helps reproducible
> building. It is used by lua-penlight.
> However, awesome and lua-posix don't use it already.
> 
> What should you recommend?
> 1) patch awesome and lua-posix to use --date
> 2) patch lua-ldoc to add SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, on top of --date. This would
> be more reliable, but maybe lua-ldoc will get a little messy/muddled?
> 
> Thanks for your advice,
> Alexis Bienvenüe.
> 

Hi Alexis, 

One of the motivation factors for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH was to have a *standardised* method for build tools to use - i.e. O(1) effort - instead of every tool inventing their own special command line flag that then every distribution each has to know about - i.e. O(m * n) effort.

The most preferable route would be to persuade upstream to accept patch (2). If they don't do that, then it's still worth doing option (2) over (1) because other tools in Debian at least can rely on this standard, instead of hard-coding lua-ldoc-specific logic everywhere.

Hope that makes sense,
Ximin

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