[Reproducible-builds] [Pkg-mc-devel] Bug#828683: mc: please make the build reproducible

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

Hi Reiner,

On Sun, 26 Jun 2016, Reiner Herrmann wrote:

> Yes, it is standardized [1] and already supported by a lot of build 
> tools [2], e.g. even by gcc. Other distributions and FreeBSD are 
> currently also in the process of adopting it.

Thank you for the clarifications! Maybe you could consider including these 
links in the original reports to mitigate such follow-up questions...

I've had a look at our build system, and my impression is that your patch 
should not be necessary. Please have a look at

     doc/man/date-of-man-include.am

and in particular at MAN_DATE_CMD variable and following targets.

It encodes mtime of the source man file in the output, rather than the 
build date, so, as long as the source date is not modified, the build 
should be reproducible.

I believe that the lines that you have patched are currently unused and 
should be simply removed.

Am I missing something?

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev