[Reproducible-builds] Doxygen issue with reproducible builds

[marivalen]

Hi,

On 02/16/2015 02:29 AM, Holger Levsen wrote:
> given that there are 286 packages affected by the problem, what do you think
> about uploading a fixed doxygen package to our repo? ;-)

Most of the 286 packages suffer from HTML timestamps and not from Latex 
timestamps that my patch addresses.

The default for HTML_TIMESTAMP in upstream doxygen is to enable 
timestamps and my patch for LATEX_TIMESTAMP does the same. Thus, making 
an upload to the experimental repository with my patch for 
LATEX_TIMESTAMP support will not automatically fix all affected packages.

I can make an upload of doxygen with HTML_TIMESTAMP and LATEX_TIMESTAMP 
defaults changed to not embedding timestamps. But if doxygen upstream is 
unwilling to change the default or if the maintainers of doxygen in 
Debian are unwilling to deviate from upstream in this, then the upload 
would not make much sense and instead it would hide a problem.

Furthermore the Doxyfile configuration file embedded in each package 
using doxygen is often copied from the upstream defaults and thus 
enables HTML_TIMESTAMP. The following query on codesearch.d.n shows that 
277 source packages are affected:
http://codesearch.debian.net/results/HTML_TIMESTAMP%20%2B%3D%20YES%20path%3ADoxyfile/page_0

So no matter whether my patch to doxygen is applied or not, these 277 
source packages will either need individual fixes or a change to doxygen 
which allows to ignore the setting of HTML_TIMESTAMP in Doxyfile. I can 
implement this but this again has to be discussed with the Debian 
maintainers and doxygen upstream.

Cheers, akira