Reproducible builds ruin time_conversion_helper

[realazthat]

I use bazel as my build system, and bazel specializes in reproducible builds, which basically means it tries to build everything in a sandbox with limited access to system libraries, and replaces the various date macros with some string like REDACTED . This breaks the time_conversion_helper and asserts(false) at runtime.

not sure what the best solution is, but it would be great if there was a macro that made the time-based macros optional.

My solution is to fork boost and comment out the assertion (

wave/include/boost/wave/util/time_conversion_helper.hpp

Line 127 in 99ccc6e

BOOST_ASSERT(0 != compile_time);

).

[jefftrull]

It looks like the purpose of this code is to help produce version strings for Wave itself (including its samples). I think it might be fine to produce UNKNOWN as a string in cases where parsing fails, instead of doing this assert. We'd need some test cases too to ensure valid date/time strings didn't start getting misparsed.

[jefftrull]

Another idea: I read about SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH; if we offered a setting that would help you implement that (i.e. by overriding system time) would that suffice?