I've attached a patch to
* fix the reproducibility issue by using the date of the latest
entry in debian/changelog (via $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH) instead of
the build date, as I've mentioned in our private discussion;
* use the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) to avoid any ambiguity.
This is done by putting
<date>SOURCE_DATE</date>
in the DocBook XML files from which the man pages will be generated,
and in debian/rules, replace SOURCE_DATE by the output of
date -d @$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH -u +%F
before executing xsltproc (via a pipe).
--
Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
diff -aurd cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/cron.8.xml cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/cron.8.xml
--- cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/cron.8.xml 2025-04-06 18:07:22.000000000 +0000
+++ cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/cron.8.xml 2025-12-15 00:59:46.378219723 +0000
@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@
<refentryinfo>
<title>&dhtitle;</title>
<productname>&dhpackage;</productname>
+ <date>SOURCE_DATE</date>
<authorgroup>
<author>
<firstname>Paul</firstname> <surname>Vixie</surname>
diff -aurd cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/crontab.1.xml cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/crontab.1.xml
--- cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/crontab.1.xml 2025-10-05 18:35:41.000000000 +0000
+++ cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/crontab.1.xml 2025-12-15 00:59:01.063152081 +0000
@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@
<refentryinfo>
<title>&dhtitle;</title>
<productname>&dhpackage;</productname>
+ <date>SOURCE_DATE</date>
<authorgroup>
<author>
<firstname>Paul</firstname> <surname>Vixie</surname>
diff -aurd cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/crontab.5.xml cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/crontab.5.xml
--- cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/crontab.5.xml 2025-12-13 15:11:30.000000000 +0000
+++ cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/crontab.5.xml 2025-12-15 00:59:32.494502366 +0000
@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@
<refentryinfo>
<title>&dhtitle;</title>
<productname>&dhpackage;</productname>
+ <date>SOURCE_DATE</date>
<authorgroup>
<author>
<firstname>Paul</firstname> <surname>Vixie</surname>
diff -aurd cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/rules cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/rules
--- cron-3.0pl1-a/debian/rules 2025-12-13 14:54:47.000000000 +0000
+++ cron-3.0pl1-b/debian/rules 2025-12-15 01:02:09.511443457 +0000
@@ -85,11 +85,13 @@
manpages:
for f in debian/crontab.1 debian/crontab.5 debian/cron.8; do \
+ sed "s/SOURCE_DATE/$$(date -d @$$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH -u +%F)/" \
+ $$f.xml | \
xsltproc --nonet --param man.charmap.use.subset "0" \
--param make.year.ranges "1" --param make.single.year.ranges "1" \
--output $$f \
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/docbook-xsl/manpages/docbook.xsl
\
- $$f.xml; \
+ -; \
done
.PHONY: manpages
