[Pkg-pascal-devel] fpc and reproducible builds

[Paul Gevers]

Hi all,

You may have noticed that in the last couple of upload of our packages,
I have been working on getting our tools to build reproducible¹.

I have nearly nailed all the issues that I think should be fixed within
our own tools (e.g. Latex introducing timestamps should be fixed in
Latex). However, for the last one I need your help and/or advice.

Yesterday, I created the wiki page² about reproducible issues with ppu
files. The issue is that fpc stores the date of the source file of a ppu
into the ppu file. Looking at it, however, I am unsure if this timestamp
is actually really used. You don't need the source to use the ppu,
rigth? Does anybody know this? Abou? Otherwise, if somebody (Michalis
maybe) could test if updating the timestamp of the source of an ppu
(e.g. by using touch) after the ppu is build but before it is used
causes any issues?

If the date in the ppu is not critical, I am going to propose a patch to
upstream to honor the environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH³. I will
include an improved patch for the documentation issues then as well, so
that we don't need to carry Debian specific patches for long.

Thanks for your help.
Paul
P.s. I am working on getting ppudump functionality into diffoscope, the
tool used by the reproducibility project to view differences.

¹
https://reproducible.debian.net/unstable/index_dd-list.html#pkg-pascal-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
² https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/TimestampsInPPUGeneratedByFPC
³ https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/

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