Possibly malformed date in several manual pages

[Alexander Best]

On Fr. Jan.  8 2021, Polytropon wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jan 2021 11:35:05 +0000, Alexander Best wrote:
> > "$Date:" and "$" in the vacation-example of course aren't pretty to have in a
> > manual page, but I crosschecked with Linux and here those terms are also
> > displayed at the end of the according manual page.
> > 
> > One might could take care of this during the installation process of the manual
> > pages, but it's probably not worth the hassle.
> 
> Just a question:
> 
> It looks like "$Date: <something> $" is expanded from the $Date$
> header known in CVS (among others). With the transition to SVN
> and now to Git, wouldn't those be subject to being converted into
> Git's own human-readable headers, making the date information
> known to the version control system, or maybe "overwriting" them
> with its own timestamp? Or are they kept "as is" when importing
> sources from other version control systems (like RCS, CVS, SVN)?

Hi Polytropon,

that's a valid question. I'm not sure, to be honest. Looking at older *.c files
withing the FreeBSD repository which originated from 4.*BSD or UNIX shows some
legacy vcs-tags. These however mostly appear in the initial copyright statement
and thus don't affect the code (or the manuals).

[1] on the other hands states the following:

"The dist tree can be cleaned up as necessary. Disabling keyword expansion is
recommended, as it makes no sense on unmodified vendor code and in some cases
it can even be harmful. OpenSSH, for example, includes two files that originated
with FreeBSD and still contain the original version tags."

One could of course get a snapshot (e.g. via svn) of some vendor import and try
to remove the tags using `svn propdel svn:keywords -R .`?

I wouldn't vote for removing legacy tags in general, but would like to see
sensable TH-statements within those manual pages I mentioned.

Kind regards,
Alexander

1: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.html#subversion-primer,
   Section 5.4.4.1.2. (Cleaning Up).

> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Polytropon
> Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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