On Fri, 2014-07-25 at 16:02 -0700, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> I'm mainly arguing that for most use cases, omitting the
> timestamp wouldn't hurt/would be better.
> Doing this upstream in javadoc seemed to be the most
> future-proof way, as it just flips the default.
> And honestly, the current default is suboptimal for both use
> cases.
> The timestamp should either be in the actual output (not in a
> comment) or not present at all.
>
>
> I disagree. There's a long tradition of using Show Source for humans
> or robots to get more metadata about the web page. Metadata that
> might not be worth putting visibly on the page itself. This data is
> not incredibly valuable, but it is occasionally useful. The same way
> that timestamps on files are occasionally useful. It's only a few
> release engineers of the world that are annoyed by the reproducibility
> problem (yes, I am also affected). So just go and improve your
> release-diffing tools.
>
Maybe a compromise would be to record the timestamp of the file that the
docs were built from instead of the current time? That would be useful
and easily reproducible.