Bug#863206: whitedune: please make the build reproducible (buildpath)

[Daniel Shahaf]

Source: whitedune
Version: 0.30.10-2.1
Severity: wishlist
User: reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: buildpath
X-Debbugs-Cc: reproducible-bugs at lists.alioth.debian.org

Hi!

While working on the “reproducible builds” effort [1], we have noticed
that whitedune could not be built reproducibly.  One of the reasons for
that is that it embeds the basename of the build directory as a string
literal in the resultant artifacts, through the batch/getversion.sh and
batch/replaceversion.sh scripts.  The artifacts are therefore different
when the build directory is named "whitedune-*" versus when it is,
say, "blackhill-*".

You can see the results here:
.
    https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/whitedune.html
    (last hunk in the .rodata section)

An easy fix would be to make replace the entirety of getversion.sh with
a `dpkg-parsechangelog -SVersion` invocation, and similarly for replaceversion.sh;
however, this solution would not be upstreamable.  A better solution
would be for upstream to obtain the version number in some other way on
all platforms (the version number doesn't appear anywhere in the tree,
other than debian/changelog and packager/debian/changelog).

How would you like to proceed?

Cheers,

Daniel

 [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds