On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Reiner Herrmann <rei...@reiner-h.de> wrote: > In 3.0.1+dfsg-6 a patch has been added that allows packages to disable > embedding of timestamps. > But the default behavior of epydoc is to still embed timestamps (which > requires modifications > for each package using epydoc). > If timestamps have to be kept, we have a proposal for using deterministic > ones [1] (based on > the latest debian/changelog entry), which is contained in the environment > variable > SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (which will hopefully soon be exported by debhelper). > > The attached patch proposes a way to use this variable to get reproducible > timestamps, if the > variable has been set (if not, it falls back to the old behavior).
Hi Reiner, I have been following the reproducible builds effort. I appreciate you providing this patch. However, I have some concerns with it. My main concern is that this patch adds some rather Debian-specific behavior to epydoc. I'm not entirely comfortable with this, given that eypdoc is a general-purpose tool which just happens to be used when building some Debian packages. Adding a new command-line switch is one thing, but changing behavior to respond silently to a environment variable feels different to me. This would be the only environment variable that epydoc pays any attention to. I skimmed through the comments in #787444, and I gather that help2man has added support for this environment variable. Are you filing similar bugs with other documentation-generator packages in Debian? Have other packages committed to supporting it? Are you expecting this to become a standard used by other Linux distributions? It seems like relatively few Debian packages use epydoc as part of their build process. I guess I'm questioning whether it's really worth adding this Debian-specific behavior just to avoid changing those packages. I'm not saying no, but I would like to get a better handle on some of these questions before I apply the patch and release a new package. I've also CC'd upstream (Edward Loper) to see if he has an opinion one way or the other. Thanks, KEN -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
