Bug#792687: [Reproducible-builds] Bug#792687: gettext: please support timestamps from environment

[Santiago Vila]

On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 06:04:58PM +0000, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> So: should po file generation allow the caller to control the timestamp
> that would be embedded?

Maybe, or maybe not.

But so far, the non-reproducible Debian packages using gettext I've
seen fail to be reproducible because maintainers insist on
regenerating a .pot file at build time and performing msgmerge on all
the .po files with the newly generated .pot file "just in case", or
doing similar things.

IMHO, that's clearly a task that would be better done before build time
(i.e. taken out from the build process), much like upstream authors call
autoconf before creating the final tarball when making a release.

Thanks.