Re: [PATCH PING] Honor 'SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH' when generating autoloads.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2015 22:54:04 -0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Some code out there that expects the value to be a string might become
> > broken by such a change, I think.
> 
> I doubt whether there is any such code that will break.

It doesn't matter.  Let's not make changes that gratuitously break
backward compatibility.  A fixed string is good enough to serve this
use case, so no need to make it nil.

> No code uses the variable within Emacs itself; I just checked.

I plan on adding it to the bug report, where it was before a recent
change to emacs-version.  This information is sometimes very important
when working on bugs.

> We should also obsolete the variable, while we're at it. There's a comment to 
> that effect before the variable. Really, code should not be using 
> emacs-build-system.

It's important information in some cases, and I don't plan to remove
it any time soon, sorry.