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

From: Philipp Stephani <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:33:13 +0000

David Bremner <[email-masked]> schrieb am Sa., 19. Dez. 2015 um
20:50 Uhr:

> >
> > So long as the timestamps of your inputs are fixed, the output should
> > not vary. I would be interested to hear if this solves the problem for
> you.
>
> It changes the problem to one of managing timestamps of files. This is
> probably easier than the current situation, but not completely trivial,
> since e.g. both git checkout and build systems that copy files will
> modify timestamps.
>

Agreed, this basically means that you have to do a 'find -exec touch -d @0
'{}' +' or so before every build. That's doable, but increases complexity
and can be brittle if e.g. the filesystem doesn't have accurate mtimes or
something else modifies the input files. Preferably builds should only
depend on relative file names and file contents, not other kinds of
metadata.