[Reproducible-builds] Bug#794795: debiandoc-sgml-doc: please make the build reproducible

[Dhole]

On 08/07/2015 03:39 PM, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> I noticed many people are fixing this issue in this way.  That may fix
> some itch for small group of highly technically minded people but does
> disservice to many end-users.
> 
> We should better as DD than the one proposed.
>> -  <version><date></version>
> 
> That's very rough approach.
> 
> Let's promote to use the last changelog entry date for this kind of
> BUILD_DATE for reproducible build.
> 
> I think something like the following to set it:
> 
> # short date of this Debian package (debian/changelog)
> BUILD_DATE ?= $(shell { date +'%Y-%m-%d' -d"`dpkg-parsechangelog -SDate`" || date +'(No changelog) %Y-%m-%d' ; })
> 
> Patch should be more like
> 
>> -  <version><date></version>
>> +  <version>&builddate;</version>
> 
> Then set the date via entity.
> 
> Osamu
> 

Hi Osamu,

I understand your concern about keeping the date on the generated docs.
As per your suggested solution: replacing the timestamp with the date
from latests debian/changelog entry is something we are usually doing in
the reproducible builds team to fix issues like this one.

In this case, I didn't find a nice way to pass an external variable to
the sgml files. That's why my first approach was to plainly remove the
timestamp (It happens in many packages that the timestamp is not really
needed). But I understand that in debiandoc-sgml-doc the date should be
kept. I've searched through the documentation of debiandoc, but I didn't
find how to pass external values. How do you define an entity
(&builddate in your example) so that it can be filled externally?

I can provide a patch like that once I learn how to pass external
variables to the docs :)

Thanks!
-- 
Dhole

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