Re: [PATCH v3] Add new C.UTF-8 locale (Bug 17318)

[Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021, Carlos O'Donell via Libc-alpha wrote:

> >> diff --git a/localedata/locales/i18n_ctype b/localedata/locales/i18n_ctype
> >> index c63e0790fc..c92bb95148 100644
> >> --- a/localedata/locales/i18n_ctype
> >> +++ b/localedata/locales/i18n_ctype
> >> @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ fax       ""
> >>  language  ""
> >>  territory "Earth"
> >>  revision  "13.0.0"
> >> -date      "2020-06-25"
> >> +date      "2021-02-17"
> >>  category  "i18n:2012";LC_CTYPE
> >>  END LC_IDENTIFICATION
> > 
> > Those date changes seem spurious.  Is this no-op file regeneration
> > really needed?
> 
> The protocol is:
> 
> cd localedata/unicode-gen
> make install
> 
> The spurious regeneration is not needed, but it's easier to run the
> above commands. It gives a date for the last generation for all files
> consistently.

Is it required to have a date in the file at all?

For anything that's generated during the glibc build and ends up 
installed, we'd avoid having such dates to allow for reproducible builds.  
As this is a maintainer generation of something checked in as a source 
file, rather than regenerated from makefile dependencies in a normal glibc 
build, that doesn't strictly apply, but I still think it would be a good 
idea to avoid having dates or other such non-reproducible output in 
maintainer-generated files as far as possible.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com