bug#26247: Gettext introduces timestamps in .mo files

[Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas]

Hi!

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> skribis:
>
>> So it's not gettext itself, but our build system that generates the
>> en@quote and en@boldquote files. Do we really need them? If so, we
>> should find a way to generate them reproducibly.
>
> They’re generated automatically by the gettext Makefilery that we use,
> so I don’t think there’s much we can do?

The issue isn't on those files but on POT generation.  Currently
xgettext doesn't honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to fill POT-Creation-Date,
which is used to fill PO-Revision-Date for auto-generated po files.
These files are included into tarballs generated by make dist, therefore
its date is already fixed, but they aren't present on our git tree---for
obvious reasons.

This bug has already been reported upstream[1] and probably I'll push it
as soon as I have more test cases prepared and receive a brief review,
but I can prepare a patch for previous versions if it's needed too.

Best regards,
Miguel

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?59658