[Nano-devel] Remove build time from online help

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi,

I'm not sure if you're aware of the various "reproducible builds" efforts
across distros. Debian is making loads of progress in this area, and one
of the affected packages is nano, due to:

    printf(_(" GNU nano version %s (compiled %s, %s)\n"), VERSION,
        __TIME__, __DATE__);

I agree with the patch proponents in

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=774388

that this string is not really useful for anyone, and I would just remove it
entirely. An alternative would be to show release date there, which would be
constant across builds, but it also adds little value and is info that can
be found in the NEWS file.

So even if rather late in the 2.4 cycle, and actually adding a fuzzy string,
but I'd love to see this in the final 2.4.0 release, and suggest releasing a
quick pre4 with it so translators can again catch up.

--- nano-2.2.6.orig/src/nano.c
+++ nano-2.2.6/src/nano.c
@@ -935,8 +935,7 @@ void usage(void)
  * it was compiled with. */
 void version(void)
 {
-    printf(_(" GNU nano version %s (compiled %s, %s)\n"), VERSION,
-       __TIME__, __DATE__);
+    printf(_(" GNU nano version %s\n"), VERSION);
     printf(" (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007,\n");
     printf(" 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.\n");
     printf(

(patch credit goes to Lunar <address@hidden>)

I intend to carry this patch in Debian, but that will mean a visible string
will be untranslated for all languages until an upstream nano applies it, so
that's why I suggest it's added to 2.4.0. Note that Debian won't ship nano
2.4 until the stretch release, in around two years from now.

-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
address@hidden     address@hidden     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/

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