Hi Eric and all, eb> now questioning why Debian ever needed a patch to rip UPDATED out of eb> the manual in the name of reproducibility.
Me too. If the mtime isn't changed, then the original UPDATED should be unchanged, and there's no problem. If the mtime is intentionally changed by a patch or some such, then UPDATED should, in fact, be updated. Seems to me. If the mtime is changed incorrectly, e.g., because git didn't preserve mtimes (is that in fact the original cause?), isn't it up to whatever process created the problem to also fix it? How can Automake know whether an mtime change is "real" or not? Automake certainly can't assume that the project is using git, or following particular conventions with releases, or whatever. And adding another file to be updated by hand would make the problem worse, not better, so far as I can see. So I'm stumped. > by ALL packages affected by the same problem will I still don't understand what the "problem" is. I.e., how the mtime gets changed in the first place. In general, it seems unfortunate to me to eliminate useful information from the manual because of a reproducibility bug elsewhere in the build process. Expedient, yes, I can see that, but unfortunate, and not in users' best interests. -k
