Hi Frederic,
So, I re-built Fedora packages and found that the patch I mentioned above
is actually creating a new dependency on packages that use automake:
It's so frustrating. The original tarball is (presumably) entirely
correct but the playing with pretend mtimes causes timestamp problems.
Does not seem surprising.
Debian also reported this, but I never saw any clear explanation as
to why it was happening.
Anyway, here is my guess: you set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to the spec file
mtime, per Carlos. If that mtime is newer than the mtime of the .info
files, well, make will think they need to be recreated. Even though the
mtime of the .texi file is, presumably, older than the spec file, it's
been forced to be considered newer.
In other words, you've forced the texi file to be considered to have the
same mtime as the spec file, and that might well be newer than the
previously-generated (years and years ago) info files.
I don't know if that's what's really happening. Can you investigate
please? And if it is, I don't know what to do about it :(.
Maybe making mdate-sh aware of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH was a wrong idea :(.
Thanks,
Karl
