bug#20314: [PATCH] Make output of mdate-sh deterministic

[Mathieu Lirzin]

Hello Paul,

Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> Unfortunately that patch to Automake's mdate-sh is not portable, as
> TZ='UTC' is not a portable setting for the TZ environment
> variable. POSIX says you're supposed to use something like TZ='UTC0'
> instead. Although TZ='UTC' works when glibc is used, this is not
> necessarily true on other POSIX platforms.
>
> I noticed this problem when recent Automake changes were merged into
> Gnulib, and installed the attached patch to the Automake master branch
> to fix this. Please review any other patches you may be using for
> reproducible builds, and fix them to use TZ='UTC0' instead of
> TZ='UTC'. Thanks.
>
> For reference, here's the POSIX spec for TZ:
>
> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap08.html#tag_08_03
>
> and look for "TZ".

Thanks for fixing that and for the reference.

> From 5b240b3b36766045a47a6ad89ae5f4550e81d534 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 20:08:48 -0700
> Subject: [PATCH] * lib/mdate.sh (TZ): Use portable setting.

nitpick: I would prefer your future commit messages to include a summary
line before the list of modified files.

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin
GPG: F2A3 8D7E EB2B 6640 5761  070D 0ADE E100 9460 4D37