Bug#1064648: allegro5-doc: please make the build reproducible.

[Andreas Rönnquist]

On Sun, 25 Feb 2024 17:23:55 +0000 James Addison <jay at jp-hosting.net> wrote:
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> I'm an occasional volunteer contributor to the Reproducible Builds[1] project,
> and noticed recently that your package allegro5-doc failed an automated Debian
> package build reproducibility test[2].
> 
> There appear to be two problems that contribute to the non-reproducibility:
> 
>   * The 'Last updated' message on each page does not use the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
>     build timestamp (you can find documentation and C code to use it here[3]).
> 
>   * When sorting example documents to reference alongside functions, the
>     documentation generation code selects the top-three most popular pages to
>     cross-reference, but it does not have a tie-breaker in the case of equally
>     popular pages.  This means that the ordering of those examples may vary
>     between builds, depending on the order in which the files are discovered
>     from the filesystem.
> 
> For the latter case, it might be acceptable to use string comparison of the
> filenames as a tiebreaker.
> 

Thanks for the report - I have pushed two commits to a branch of
allegro5 on github, which I would be glad if you could take a look at
and see if they seem reasonable to you, or if you can discover any
problems with them. If they're fine, I'll make a pull request upstream
and try to make a new debian package release soon(ish).

https://github.com/gusnan/allegro5/commit/e4369e13b1edb96b8ae4821c5363ac7b61002d3e
https://github.com/gusnan/allegro5/commit/842af9e5d6cd9c8fd0d0d2f8095f872e7bd77cef

best
/Andreas
gusnan at debian.org