Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes: > Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> writes: > >> 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. > > Okay, I can see the appeal of that. I don't think I can help achieve that > goal as a maintainer of the generator program, though, unfortunately. > There isn't really a lever that I can pull to push things in that > direction other than forcing a date to be provided as part of the > interface, which is an extremely backward-incompatible change that would > break the world and therefore isn't really feasible. There is already a > flag for people to set the date if they want to, but they have to use it. Your flag is all you have to do in pod2man to help, I think. It would be nice if help2man had a similar flag. Then maintainers who care about this problem can opt-in to provide the timestamp they prefer (or opt-in to go with tooling defaults). Alas, there is probably no general recommendation that we can make here. Some people want to have timestamps, some people prefer not having them. Some people want the timestamp to correspond to the last modification time of the tool or text, some want it to match the least release of the package, and some want it to match SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH which merely transfer the problem to picking the appropriate value for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (build time? debian/changelog time? git commit time? Debian stable release time?). /Simon
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