On 4/17/06, A. Costa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 11:44:37 -0600 > "Shaun Jackman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Although it's an admirable goal to have the timestamps of the > > documents represent their most recent change, I'm not sure it's > > feasible without a gross ammount of effort. The thirteen files with > > the time stamp of 2006-04-13 13:48 are all upstream documentation. The > > time stamps are munged by any number of processes, including > > generating the HTML file from the DocBook XML file. > > I can imagine. This might be considered an upstream bug, yet in cases > where upstream won't fix it the question is should Debian? If so, how? > > I'm thinking there could be some new util that would take care of this > for maintainers. That is, as soon as a Debian package is first ... > This isn't hard to code, but not being a Debian developer I don't know > where in the DD's tool chain it ought to fit. That is, would this > hypothetical util belong in a new package or an old one.
This hypothetical tool should belong to the debhelper tool suite. It is most related to the dh_installdocs tool. At least, dh_installdocs copies the documents into the package, and it could also possibly set the time stamps. Where it gets the time stamp information from is another matter. Alternatively, there is a tool dh_fixperms that goes through the package fixing permission modes. A new utility, dh_fixtimestamps, could operate in the same vein. I'm going to reassign this bug as a wishlist item to the debhelper package. > Another thing to decide would be for cases where Debian takes one doc > file and converts it to another format, should the converted file keep > the original file's date? Note: if nothing has changed, the converted > file, if needlessly reconverted on every new Debian version, should at > least keep the date of the last differing conversion. Preferably, the installed document should have the same time stamp as the document's source file. > > The Debian specific documentation is another matter. I should be able > > to keep the time stamps of README.Debian, changelog.Debian and > > copyright correct. I'll keep this in mind the next time I do a > > maintenance release of FreeGuide. > > That'd be good too. Thanks for maintaining the package! I'm afraid fixing the time stamps of the Debian documentation is actually *harder* than fixing the time stamps of the upstream documentation. The Debian documentation is distributed in a patch (.diff) file, which does not include any time stamp information -- or any meta-data at all for that matter, such as file permissions! So, every time one unpacks the source package, the time stamps of all the Debian documentation take the time of the unpacking. Cheers, Shaun
