[rb-general] [PATCH] Document timestamp clamping

[Holger Levsen]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 10:32:37AM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> it's still an important purpose, and in terms of "telling agreers what
> to do" i think we need to include the concept of clamping.  If someone
> wants to propose a narrower edit, and/or wants to take any of the text
> i've proposed and put it in the wiki, i have no problem with that.
 
if you want to amend the spec, I think that work should be done in git
branches. (if you want to amend the examples, I think that should be
done in the wiki.)

> I do have a problem with leaving clamping out of the spec itself,
> though.  That suggests that we're now expecting multiple tools to do
> something that is subtly and *explicitly* different from what the
> specification says to do with this environment variable, which means
> either the spec is wrong, or we're wrong to suggest that people use
> SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in different ways.
> 
> I think clamping is the right thing to do, which means i think the spec
> is currently wrong.  We should fix it.  Just because it's a rare case
> doesn't mean it should be ignored.

I must say that the logic of these two paragraphs sounds very
compelling. I'm not fully convinced yet, that clamping is right and the
spec is wrong though. Can you summarize clamping in one simple sentence?

(I do also agree with Chris that we should be very very conservative
with the spec and keep the spec as short as possible.)


-- 
cheers,
	Holger
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