[Reproducible-builds] Bug#774496: ncurses: please make ncurses build reproducibly

[Sven Joachim]

On 2015-01-03 15:47 +0100, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:

> Sven Joachim:
>> I am not strictly opposed to your patch, but I think the problem should
>> be tackled elsewhere, so that fewer packages need to be modified.
>
> In our experimental toolchain, packages built using `dh` will
> automatically call `dh_strip_nondeterminism`. Packages using `dh` are
> the 60% plateau you can see on:
> https://jenkins.debian.net/userContent/stats_pkg_state.png
>
> Since a few days, we are getting more packages considered reproducible
> as we moved generation of the .buildinfo files to dpkg-buildpackage
> instead of doing it as a dh stop.
>
>> Have you considered filing a wishlist bug against binutils to build with
>> "--enable-deterministic-archives", so that ar and ranlib operate in
>> deterministic mode by default?
>
> Yes. This is how we did the experiment in January last year:
> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/Rebuild20140126
>
> During discussions at DebConf14, it was acknowledged that having
> `--enable-deterministic-archives` could break some build systems in
> subtle ways and that it would be better to do without. Unfortunately,
> I have never been able to get Matthias Klose's opinion on the matter.

Apparently doko thinks that `--enable-deterministic-archives` is a good
idea, since he implemented it in binutils 2.25-6. :-)  Is there still
anything I need to do in ncurses?

Cheers,
       Sven