Subject: bug#22213: 24.5; please allow specification or elimination of timestamp in autoloads

From: Philipp Stephani <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:29:18 +0000

David Bremner <[email-masked]> schrieb am Sa., 19. Dez. 2015 um
19:56 Uhr:

>
> I'm maintaining a tool in debian that installs package.el packages so
> they can be managed by the system package system.
>
> For various reasons (see http://reproducible-builds.org for motivations)
> it is desirable if packages unpack into elpa directories in a
> reproducible (i.e. bit identical every time) way. Unfortunately
> update-directory-autoloads uses (current-time), which effectively means
> this unpacking is different every time. It would be nice to be able to
> override the time used, or perhaps eliminate the timestamp entirely.
>

My understanding of
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-12/msg00309.html is
that the goal is to make Emacs builds fully deterministic (even by default,
or as the only option). According to
https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/timestamps/ it would be great to avoid
timestamps in loaddef files (and everywhere else) entirely.