Bug#720689: debian/control.new rule is not deterministic

[Michael Tautschnig]

Control: severity -1 serious
Control: affects -1 mclibs
Control: tags -1 patch

The FTBFS is caused by the following rule:

debian/control.new: $(wildcard debian/control.d/*.control)
        cat $^ > $@


There seems to be no guarantee about the sortedness of the result of "wildcard"
- hence from invocation to invocation the order may change. Consequently the
output varies, and hence the test

[ -z "`diff debian/control debian/control.new`" ]

fails. Here's a summary from the mclibs package, which suffers from the same
problem as it uses cernlib-debian.mk:

~/mclibs-20061220+dfsg3# diff -u debian/control debian/control.new | grep Package:
-Package: libcojets2-dev
-Package: libcojets2-gfortran
+Package: libpdflib804-2-gfortran
-Package: libeurodec1-dev
+Package: montecarlo-data
-Package: libeurodec1-gfortran
 Package: libherwig59-2-dev
-Package: libherwig59-2-gfortran
+Package: libphotos202-1-gfortran
+Package: libeurodec1-dev
+Package: libphtools2-dev
+Package: libcojets2-dev
+Package: libphotos202-dev
 Package: libisajet758-3-dev
-Package: libisajet758-3-gfortran
+Package: montecarlo-base
 Package: libpdflib804-2-dev
-Package: libpdflib804-2-gfortran
+Package: libherwig59-2-gfortran
-Package: libphotos202-1-gfortran
+Package: libeurodec1-gfortran
-Package: libphotos202-dev
-Package: libphtools2-dev
 Package: libphtools2-gfortran
-Package: montecarlo-base
+Package: libcojets2-gfortran
-Package: montecarlo-data
+Package: libisajet758-3-gfortran

Amending said rule as follows

debian/control.new: $(wildcard debian/control.d/*.control)
        cat $(sort $^) > $@

should do the trick (it does make things work for mclibs without any change to
mclibs).

Best,
Michael

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 859 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-science-maintainers/attachments/20140531/255ef27d/attachment.sig>