[bug #60655] want option for output drivers to suppress comments

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #7, bug #60655 (project groff):

Speaking as a general user, I periodically need to verify that some change
I've made to some roff code that _shouldn't_ change the PostScript output does
not, in fact, change the PostScript output.  The most straightforward way to
do this is *diff*ing the .ps files,* but the %%CreationDate is just noise that
needs to be ignored for this.  I also sometimes compare output from a sandbox
build of groff to that from a stock 1.22.4 build, which adds further noise
(%%Creator, %%DocumentSuppliedResources, and %%BeginResource all embed groff
version information) that I must also filter.

SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (presumably the found solution to which you refer) does help
with %%CreationDate, so I'm less concerned about the flag to suppress that. 
But SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH affects the behavior of programs besides groff, and a
user might want a groff-specific way to ignore this line without affecting
other software.  And it just feels cleaner to be able to say "I don't care
about the timestamp" rather than "Use this phony timestamp."

Do you oppose the addition of such flags, or just question their necessity?



* Yes, there are ways to compare the rendered page that the PostScript code
generates, and sometimes I must resort to these.  But they are agonizingly
slow for documents of any length.  *diff* is blindingly quick--even on my
decrepit hardware, even on PostScript files that run hundreds of pages--so
will always be the first tool I reach for.

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