[Pkg-pascal-devel] lazarus reproducible build

[Alexis Bienvenüe]

Dear maintainers,

While working on the “reproducible builds” effort [1], we have noticed
that 'lazarus' could not be built reproducibly [2].

The timestamp of codehelp.pas is included in codehelp.ppu. This would
not be a problem if codehelp.pas were not patched: when dpkg-source
applies debian/patches/Fix-case-issue-with-code-help.patch, the
timestamp of codehelp.pas is set to the current build time.

Maybe a solution to this problem is to make fpc honour the
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [3], so that when this
environment variable is set, all the source file timestamps included in
the ppu files are set to the corresponding date.

What is your opinion?

Regards,
Alexis Bienvenüe.

 [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
 [2]: https://reproducible.debian.net/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/lazarus.html
 [3]: https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/