Bug#792687: [Reproducible-builds] Bug#792687: gettext: please support timestamps from environment

[Bruno Haible]

Santiago Vila wrote:
> But so far, the non-reproducible Debian packages using gettext I've
> seen fail to be reproducible because maintainers insist on
> regenerating a .pot file at build time and performing msgmerge on all
> the .po files with the newly generated .pot file "just in case", or
> doing similar things.

Have you included the support for reproducible builds [1] in the
Debian package of gettext?

If not, that's what you need to do. Debian and the GNU project are in
favour of reproducible builds, but no gettext release is planned for the next
few months. So please help out by pulling this patch.

"Regenerating a .pot file at build time" and "performing msgmerge on all
the .po files with the newly generated .pot file just in case" are not
a problem. They take a couple of CPU cycles, but they do not introduce
non-reproducibility - assuming you use patch [1].

If yes, then please show me a package that still is non-reproducible because
of gettext.

> IMHO, that's clearly a task that would be better done before build time
> (i.e. taken out from the build process), much like upstream authors call
> autoconf before creating the final tarball when making a release.

Different package maintainers do it differently, and there are good arguments
for doing it either way. There are plans to improve this situation [2].

Bruno

[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=commit;h=d13f165b83701dffc14f7151419e0c00c00c0d1b
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?50910