An issue has been raised for reportlab to support a specific environment variable namely SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. The intent is that we should get our time from this variable rather than time.localtime(time.time()) so that produced documents are more invariant.

First off is this a reasonable request? The variable is defined by debian here https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/

What happens if other distros decide not to use this environment variable? Do I really want distro specific code in the package?

In addition we already have our own mechanism for making the produced documents
invariant although it might require an extension to support externally specified date & time as in the debian variable.

In short where does the distro responsibility and package maintainers boundary need to be?
--
Robin Becker
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