Re: [PATCH PING] Honor 'SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH' when generating autoloads.

[Paul Eggert]

Philipp Stephani wrote:
> I thought that too, but on second thought it seems rather difficult: the
> variable should be set to nil by default in an initialized Emacs (and
> probably also in temacs), yet we need a way to set it to t based on the
> configuration option.

Doesn't your proposed patch already set deterministic-dump to t based on the 
configuration option? I don't see the difficulty.

> +  (if deterministic-dump "unknown" (system-name))

How about changing this to:

    (when (not deterministic-dump) (system-name))

and document that the value is nil when unavailable? That should be cleaner than 
the confusion if a system name actually happens to be "unknown". Similarly, 
init_system_name should leave Vsystem_name alone when DETERMINISTIC_DUMP.

> +#ifdef DETERMINISTIC_DUMP

Please change this to "if (DETERMINISTIC_DUMP)", and similarly for other uses, 
and arrange for DETERMINISTIC_DUMP to be a constant false or true. Nowadays we 
should prefer macros to constants only when they're really necessary, which 
isn't the case here.