Re: [groff] 01/03: contrib/hdtbl/examples/*.roff: Seed RNG.

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Ok, i finally say something.

address@hidden (G. Branden Robinson) wrote:
 |commit da6ac443f21ef09d90b40d2e8215955c916f396a
 |Author: G. Branden Robinson <address@hidden>
 |Date:   Sun Nov 19 22:19:52 2017 -0500
 |
 |    contrib/hdtbl/examples/*.roff: Seed RNG.
 |    
 |    Support reproducible builds by seeding hdtbl's random number generator
 |    (in contrib/hdtbl/examples/common.roff).
 |    
 |    When A/Bing roff documents after a build to see what I broke with my
 |    changes, I always have to ignore the numerous color changes caused by
 |    contrib/hdtbl/examples/common.roff seeding its random number generator
 |    with the current date/time and process ID.
 |    
 |    Zeroes turned out to be bad seeds; the tables didn't have much in the
 |    way of color gradients.
 |    
 |    Fix issue https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52462.
 |    
 |    Signed-off-by: G. Branden Robinson <address@hidden>

Yeah and i really will not look deeply into these commits no more.
As a self-nominated Debian project leader i find it disturbing
that you wanna honour reproducible-builds.org but then (1) do not
look out for $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH that is (rather read:
unfortunately!) _the_ precondition to signal reproducibility!
(2) change an aspect of a macro package that looks quite
deliberate to me.  If i where you, i would remove those changes
and instead look for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the random generator
itself.  (3) That is likely what i will do shall i ever reach
that point.

Regardless.  Really.  I am writing this because your last commit
introduced a bug in troff source code, where an else clause now
logically belongs to a different if than it should, if i recall
correctly.  The change itself is something good i would say, i had
it TODO-commented myself, too.
Sorry for the noise.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)