[rb-general] Clarification re SOURCE_BUILD_EPOCH and clamping

[Chris Lamb]

Hi Ximin,

> They MAY overwrite it with a higher (more recent) value.

How come, out of interest? Do we have any real-world examples of
people screwing up implementations because we haven't specced it out?

If not, I strongly believe there is a trade-off here between adoption
and complexity (or even sheer length) of the specification. Capturing
and documenting every corner-case is thus not necessarily in our best
overall interests when you take a step back.

> Where build processes embed timestamps that are not "current",
> but are nevertheless still specific to one execution of the
> build process […]

I remain unconvinced that clamping should be part of the spec; again,
is it something that upstreams are finding problematic that it needs
fleshing out…?


Best wishes,

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