Bug#780259: perl: please make the output of Pod::Man reproducible

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Chris,

Chris Lamb wrote:
> While working on the "reproducible builds" effort [1], we have noticed
> that Pod::Man generates output that varies depending on the current
> timezone.

While I appreciate the reproducible builds effort a lot, I don't think
hardcoding UTC instead of the local timezone is suitable for general
use.

The patch is fine for building packages in Debian -- but I think,
users using Debian's Pod::Man for their own projects will partially be
confused by UTC times, especially those users not living in Europe or
Africa, i.e. close to the GMT timezone.

For the same reason I don't think the patch is suitable for upstream
inclusion.

I can only imagine two proper solutions:

* Upstream makes that configurable. But then again, this is actually
  already configurable -- by configuring a different timezone.
* All packages are built with the same timezone.

For the reproducible builds project I would have expected that it does
the latter already anyways. So after thinking about this bug report
and writing these lines, I'm even more surprised that this bug report
has been written. But maybe I'm just missing something here. :-)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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