Bug#791362: perl: build timezone affects LOCALTIME_{MIN,MAX}

[Niko Tyni]

Control: submitter -1 !
Control: severity -1 minor
Control: tag -1 upstream

On Sat, Nov 14, 2020 at 05:27:26PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:

> I'm struggling to see the practical problem with having the timezone
> vary LOCALTIME_{MIN,MAX} (other than reproducibility, which AIUI has
> already been addressed).

I'm not aware of any practical problems here. I suspect nothing
uses $Config{sLOCALTIME_max} et al.

Reproducibility has been addressed in a Debian-specific way.  Ideally,
it would be fixed upstream so that the build result would be reproducible
regardless of the build timezone (which we are currently overriding.)

> I don't agree with the starting point that
> an environment variable shouldn't be able to influence the contents
> of the binary (this is clearly a very common and necessary pattern).

I think it depends on the environment variable and its main purpose.
Something like BUILD_BZIP2 does and should influence the result, that's
what it's there for. But what's the use for encoding the local timezone
into the binaries? Binaries can be copied between hosts in different time
zones (our buildd results certainly are), users connect to hosts from
different time zones, and even hosts (think laptops) can move between
time zones.

I don't really mind closing this, it's just a minor detail and I obviously
haven't got around to doing anything about it so far. But I do think
the current TZ=UTC solution is more a workaround than a fix.

I'm updating the metadata at least, feel free to close if you're not
convinced :)
-- 
Niko