Debian Policy encourages to preserve timestamps whenever possible in the
tarballs, thus stable release updates of systemd usually do not bump NEWS file
timestamp. And thus time-epoch remains the same for the lifetime of a release.
It would be better, if each new stable release rebuild of systemd would bump
the time epoch a bit. But at the same time remain
reproducible. SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is an environmnet variable defined for this
purpose. Thus if available, prefer that, instead of the NEWS file modification
time.
For example, on Debian/Ubuntu under the reproducible builds the
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set to the timestamp from the packaging metadata, thus it
is incremented on every new stable release update, whilst preserving
reproducible builds capability.
Reference: https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/timestamps/
It's not that I think that "hostname" is vastly superior to "host name". Quite
the opposite — the difference is small, and in some context the two-word version
does fit better. But in the tree, there are ~200 occurrences of the first, and
>1600 of the other, and consistent spelling is more important than any particular
spelling choice.
As usual, the formatting was fixed and various obvious updates
were done, but nothing major.
I removed documentation of snapshots and related methods though.
systemd.show-status=error is useful for the case where people care about errors
only.
If people want to have a quiet boot, they most likely don't want to see all
status output even if there is a delay in boot, so make "quiet" imply
systemd.show-status=error instead of systemd.show-status=auto.
Fixes#14976.
Lennart Poettering