Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > Simon Josefsson writes ("Re: Bug#1104854: binNMUs can cause ma-same > violations in eg manpages"): >> In this case, is the problem triggered by this line? >> >> https://salsa.debian.org/debian/autogen/-/blob/8b4268fa779deaba862a7938ee0d5f051860d8e7/debian/rules#L11 > > If we're editing thie package, I think we should just get rid of the > timestamps in the manpages rather than trying to control more sensibly > which (sort-of-fake) timestamp we put in there. > > Those dates in manpages are not really useful - they're a relic from a > time when one would print manpages out and want to know if the > printout was too out of date. The source-code-last-touched date is > not very useful any more even for that niche use case.
In some upstream packages I put the version number in that field, which at least provide some of the out-of-date protection. Help2man's default behaviour to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is not helpful here, IMHO, and will cause similar breakage over time unless people override the behaviour (which I do in some upstream packages). /Simon
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