Re: [groff] [patch] hdtbl: do not print the date and time during the build

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-08-04T21:05:54+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> to avoid gratuitous variation in builds, to reduce noise in build
> logs, and to reduce groff -U usage in builds, i propose to delete
> the date and time macros from contrib/hdtbl/examples.  They are not
> useful in the first place as far as i can see.

I think they might have been back when a 466 MHz Celeron CPU and almost
half a gig of RAM was considered a high-specification system.

I suspect the timing info was reported to reassure squeamish users that
their build hadn't simply gone into a busy-wait loop.

Nowadays we have beefier machines and I would expect users complaining
about a slow or "stuck" build to do a bit more homework before jumping
to conclusions.  Bertrand is doing his best to evangelize "make -j" for
the groff build, which surely will help.

> Bertrand Garrigues encouraged me to propose this for commit, and
> i'm posting here to make sure it doesn't cause problems for somebody.
> 
> Any concerns, or any OKs to commit?

I say go for it!  I considered making basically the same change myself
months ago, but decided to fry other fish.

Now that I'm back from DebConf I need to push my further rewrite of
groff_man(7).  Let's see how long it takes to write my commit message.
:P

-- 
Regards,
Branden

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