Subject: bug#26247: Gettext introduces timestamps in .mo files

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 10:09:30 +0100

Hi Miguel,

Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Julien Lepiller <[email-masked]> skribis:
>>
>>> So it's not gettext itself, but our build system that generates the
>>> en@quote and en@boldquote files. Do we really need them? If so, we
>>> should find a way to generate them reproducibly.
>>
>> They’re generated automatically by the gettext Makefilery that we use,
>> so I don’t think there’s much we can do?
>
> The issue isn't on those files but on POT generation.  Currently
> xgettext doesn't honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to fill POT-Creation-Date,
> which is used to fill PO-Revision-Date for auto-generated po files.
> These files are included into tarballs generated by make dist, therefore
> its date is already fixed, but they aren't present on our git tree---for
> obvious reasons.

OK.

> This bug has already been reported upstream[1] and probably I'll push it
> as soon as I have more test cases prepared and receive a brief review,
> but I can prepare a patch for previous versions if it's needed too.

[...]

> [1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?59658

Thanks for getting to the bottom of this and for preparing a patch
upstream!

In ‘core-updates’, we could either wait for the next Gettext release or
apply your patch in the meantime.

Ludo’.