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

[James Addison]

Source: allegro5
Version: 2:5.2.9.1+dfsg-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream
User: reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: timestamps fileordering

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.

Regards,
James

[1] - https://reproducible-builds.org

[2] - https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/trixie/i386/diffoscope-results/allegro5.html

[3] - https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/source-date-epoch/