Timestamps in ...-autoloads.el files

[Alex Kost]

Ludovic Courtès (2015-10-20 02:09 +0300) wrote:

> If we diff as explained in the doc below, we see that the Git
> discrepancies are due to timestamp in Perl’s POD files as well as
> sorted-by-inode-number ‘tclIndex’ files.  For the Emacs modes, the
> problem is the autogenerated autoloads files, which include some sort of
> a timestamp as well.
>
> You’re welcome to help fix these issues!

Thanks for the info!

Those timestamps are inserted by `autoload-insert-section-header' and
we can avoid them by advising this function, for example, like this:

autoload-advice.el
Description: application/emacs-lisp

So after putting this code into ‘emacs-generate-autoloads’ procedure
from (guix build emacs-utils) module, there will be zeros instead of
non-deterministic timestamps.

However this will fix only those packages, that use
‘emacs-generate-autoloads’ directly or via ‘emacs-build-system’.  But
there are also packages that generate autoloads on their own (for
example, 'emacs-w3m' or 'guix' itself).  What to do for these ones?

Perhaps we can make a special 'emacs-build' package (that will advise
‘autoload-insert-section-header’ function somehow) and use it as an
input for emacs-packages, or are there other ways?

-- 
Alex