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

[Bruno Haible]

Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> > it's plain text, and it's a small diff.
> 
> This doesn't scale.  (For example, in my use-case, I'm dealing with a
> 5000-line unified diff full of one-line changes in date strings and C
> comments and any number of other things. My goal is to get the number of
> lines down to zero.)

Then you will have to filter out the one-line changes that are not
important to you.

The purpose of tarballs is distribution to developers, translators,
and distros.

The purpose of Makefile.in.in rules that generate .pot files is:
The .pot files are the starting point for translators (or for the
Translation Project, which extracts the .pot files and makes them
easily accessible to the translators).
The date of the POT file is important info for the translators.

This is the main workflow. It allows for reproducible builds (through
the timestamp filtering now built into msgfmt).

> So: should po file generation allow the caller to control the timestamp
> that would be embedded?

No, that would be a regression for the translators.

> I am asserting that there is another workflow which would be simpler if
> .po file headers were also reproducible.

You'll have to adapt. Accept the main workflow as it is.

Bruno