Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes: > In particular, what "timestamp inside artifacts from the source code" > do you believe I should use? I do not have any special access to the > upstream release date. Or is the argument that the upstream build > system should explicitly pass the date for all man pages to pod2man? Yes, exactly! > This is at least theoretically possible but is often not that > straightforward depending on the details of the build system (there > are a *lot* of different build systems in play), and I'm not sure how > realistic it would be to push that change out across all packages > (which is why I tried to solve the problem in pod2man in the first > place). I think that solution is covering up the real problem. I believe there is no universal "right" timestamp to put in a man page that you can guess from a generator tool like pod2man. I believe the timestamp is part of the documentation, and IMHO should be provided in the input files or on the command-line. Consider a simple package containing two man pages. One is for a tool that frequently change and is re-factored and updated on every release. The other is for a tool that has been stable and never has changed. I think using the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH timestamp in both man pages is not helpful. Doing so solves the reproducibility problem at the expense of the purpose of the information (to tell when it was last modified). /Simon
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