BuildInfo causes some minor packaging issues

Hello!

I maintain the FreeBSD Port of Hugo, and the addition of BuildInfo has caused some minor packaging issues.

The FreeBSD Ports collection prefers building from source where possible. When a user (or the FreeBSD projects infrastructure) comes to build and package a Port, sources are pulled down from upstream (usually in tarball/zip format), extracted, and built. There is no interaction with the upstream VCS, so we can’t automatically use information that lives inside the upstream VCS during building.

Previous to Hugo using BuildInfo, we were able to manually specify the commit hash and use a mechanism for determining build time (for the goal of reproducible builds).

Now with BuildInfo, we don’t have access to the commit hash or build time.

So now for my questions:

Does the Hugo project care that these things are missing? (We still inject the vendor as freebsd as decided here).

If you don’t care that these are missing, is there a way to “turn them off” so that they don’t show in the output?

If you do care, and would like to have this output (for bug reports, etc) then I think one of two things need to happen:

  1. Reintroduce a method for manually injecting these values; or
  2. Downstream package maintainers need to patch the source to include these values.

I’m open to any method and I know this is probably a minor thing, but would like to seek advice from the Hugo project as I’m sure it’ll be you that users come to with incomplete information/complaints and not me or the FreeBSD project.

Many thanks as always,
Ben