Bug#905440: www.debian.org: remove "last modified" from footer

On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 02:06:25AM +0200, Laura Arjona Reina wrote:
>Hello all
>
>El 22/08/18 a las 01:50, Steve McIntyre escribió:
>> 
>> See https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/merge_requests/21
>> for a first attempt...
>> 
>Thanks.
>I've had a look to this and made some tests.
>
>The layout and strings look fine for me. The POT/PO templates update well.
>
>The pages seem to build well (I didn't build the whole website locally
>but tried a good portion of /english and some other languages).
>
>* Looking at the resulting times shown in the html pages, and
>researching a bit, I found this in /devel/website/working:
>
>---
>GEN_TIME="true"
>    Sets the date on the resulting files to the timestamp of the
>generated files, instead of the timestamp of the source file.
>---

Hmmm, yeah. I see that's used in a number of place, not all. No idea
why it's there, nor why anybody would think it's a good idea! Looking
at the list, *maybe* it's intended to be used in places where a page
is just a template and the contents are actually auto-generated, like
index files for security updates? Yeah, I think that's the
expectation.

Except... in Thomas' original bug report he mentions the specific URL
https://www.debian.org/women/ and that *doesn't* have the GEN_TIME
variable set. I think we're actually looking at something else here -
on the www-master server, what's the mtime of the file
english/women/index.wml? If *that* is where the "Last Modified: Fri,
Jun 1 18:42:17 UTC 2018" text is coming from, then I'll need to rework
this change to ignore the on-disk mtime and ask git instead.

>(I didn't know this existed)

You're not alone! :-)

>This variable is considered, in the MR, only in the webwml_built_time
>function (correct). The issue I see is that the variable is used in few
>pages (see attached file containing a list of the English page that have
>the variable set).
>
>I am not sure how to go now from here; if reviewing which pages should
>have the GEN_TIME="true" option in the header, or just forget about the
>GEN_TIME variable (delete it in every page) and simplify the functions
>in ctime.wml template to reuse the code that is run now when
>GEN_VARIABLE is not present for the webwml_modified_time, and the code
>that now is run when GEN_VARIABLE is present and has "yes", for the
>webwml_built_time.
>
>Note: there is some more code related to the GEN_VARIABLE in
>/english/template/debian/footer.wml that we would need to adapt if we
>decide to remove the variable.

Nod...