[rb-general] [PATCH] Document timestamp clamping

[Chris Lamb]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

> fwiw, i think that examples make a document easier for most people to
> grasp, not harder.

I am coming from my personal experiences in submitting patches to Debian
packages & upstream (as well as seeing others' contributions) in that
clamping — in comparison to vanilla application of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH —
is exceedingly, exceedinly rare.

To be sure, when it is needed, it is clearly needed; but then one is almost
certainly more immersed in Reproducible Builds lore and thus the specification
is no longer really targetted at you.

Thus on balance adding it that specification would somewhat paradoxically
be counter-productive to our goals. If you can excuse the cliche, for
documents like this, less is most definitely more and we should be highly
conservative about what we add.


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
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