#368 Honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH if available

[Kenneth J. Pronovici]

This is tied to Debian bug #790899: http://bugs.debian.org/790899

Using the current date within Epydoc-generated documentation results in documentation that is "unreproducible", meaning that the content of the files changes from build to build even if the source tree does not. The Debian Reproducible Build effort [1] is seeking to improve this situation so more packages can be built in a reproducible manner.

If the environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set, as proposed by the Debian Reproducible Builds effort, a deterministic timestamp is available that can be used to embed dates rather than using the current date. Please modify Epydoc so the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is honored. This functionality already exists in Debian as of July 2015, but we would prefer to see consistent behavior available for all users of epydoc.

The attached patch implements the requested behavior.

Thanks for considering!

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/TimestampsProposal

[Kenneth J. Pronovici]

I have attached the patch that will be included in Debian version 3.0.1+dfsg-8.

[Bernhard M. Wiedemann]

would still be nice to get this merged, so that not every distribution needs to apply this individually