[RFC] javadoc: default to not including timestamps

[bmorbach]

On Fri, 2014-07-25 at 16:02 -0700, Martin Buchholz wrote:

>         I'm mainly arguing that for most use cases, omitting the
>         timestamp wouldn't hurt/would be better.
>         Doing this upstream in javadoc seemed to be the most
>         future-proof way, as it just flips the default.
>         And honestly, the current default is suboptimal for both use
>         cases.
>         The timestamp should either be in the actual output (not in a
>         comment) or not present at all.
> 
> 
> I disagree.  There's a long tradition of using Show Source for humans
> or robots to get more metadata about the web page.  Metadata that
> might not be worth putting visibly on the page itself.  This data is
> not incredibly valuable, but it is occasionally useful.  The same way
> that timestamps on files are occasionally useful.  It's only a few
> release engineers of the world that are annoyed by the reproducibility
> problem (yes, I am also affected).  So just go and improve your
> release-diffing tools.
> 
Maybe a compromise would be to record the timestamp of the file that the
docs were built from instead of the current time? That would be useful
and easily reproducible.