Re: [PATCH] gnu: fontforge: Build fonts bit-reproducibly.

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

alírio eyng <alirioeyng@gmail.com> skribis:

>> Perhaps it would be best to honor the ‘SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH’ environment
>> variable¹ instead of always using zero?
>
>> Fontforge users who expect a meaningful timestamp in there
>> would still have it.  And the patch could even be submitted upstream
>> eventually.
> actually there are four values, two are about the font source and two
> are about the font executable
> the font executable times are not readable in the gui and by the work
> on debian, they are not readable in the api, so this change only
> low-level things invisible to users

There may be other programs out there that do display the timestamp,
though.

> this don't change dates on font information (because these come from
> font source)
> so i don't see any reason to fiddle with environment variables and
> conversions to integer in c

Well, I think this is debatable, and most likely in this form the change
is not acceptable for upstream.

I committed it anyway because I think it does more good than harm in our
case.

Thank you!

Ludo’.