Optionally suppress version number comments (allow deterministic builds) about podlators HOT 6 OPEN

Yup, I can definitely do that. Do you have a standard environment variable that you use for things like that in reproducible builds? Adding those versions by default is a requirement on the Perl POD ecosystem side, so I'd want to disable it conditionally based on whether an environment variable is set, and ideally would prefer to use a standardized environment variable similar to what we did with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

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Good question! Let me discuss with my team. I think something along the lines of PERL_REPEATABLE_BUILDS or something otherwise semantically meaningful would be appropriate. It's a bit verbose, but it's unlikely to conflict with anything else in the system. Do you have any preferences yourself?

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No strong preferences here. Pod::Man already supports one environment variable with a POD_MAN prefix, but I suspect that's too specific since you may want this to affect other things as well.

It's worth noting that lots of things that aren't Perl (such as OpenSSL, last I checked) use Pod::Man to generate man pages because people prefer to write them in POD, so there's an argument for an environment variable starting with POD_ instead. But that then wouldn't encompass other non-POD stuff in the Perl ecosystem, so there's a trade-off there.

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Just checking in on this again. Did you reach any consensus for what to call this environment variable?

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