Re: [Docutils-develop] [docutils:patches] Re: #132 Add SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to date directive

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

Dorogoj Dmitry,

On 2016-12-10, Dmitry Shachnev wrote:

> Today you reminded me about your proposal to disable the timestamps in
> `docutils.conf`. I want to ask you a question about it. You say:

>> * the man-page of git-hub generated with rst2man does not contian a
>> "date" directive
>> * instead, it seems it contains an auto-generated timestamp

> Are you sure you are correct here? To me, it looks like it *does* use a
> `date` directive on [line
> 16](http://sources.debian.net/src/git-hub/0.10.3-1/man.rst/#L16).

> And setting “`datestamp:`” in `/etc/docutils.conf` like you suggested
> does *not* seem to remove the datestamp from the generated manpage.

I remembered having looked at the upstream source without finding any use of
the date directive. I did not re-check and indeed my memory was wrong.

There is a date directive in the man page but this should be fixed upstream,
because it leads to very strange results:

Looking at an earlier version on github,
https://github.com/sociomantic-tsunami/git-hub/blob/c07474ab1429f93850b3e8ef221b38e036374630/man.rst
I see:

 c07474a on 15 Sep 2015

and a bit further down on the same page

 Version: 	devel
 Date: 	2016-12-10

With SVN, there is the chance to use RCS Keywords in the bibliographic
fields, like
  
  :Date: $Date: 2016-12-10 18:41:45 +0100 (Sa, 10. Dez 2016) $

I don't know whether it works also under Git but it should be worth a try.


> Also, do you know a test case where setting that option would change
> something? For me neither `rst2html` nor `rst2man` put the datestamp
> into the footer unless I explicitly ask them to do so.

OK, so it seems the option is off by default. Fine.

Sorry for the hassle,

Günter