[Reproducible-builds] Bug#792687: gettext: please support timestamps from environment

[Santiago Vila]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2015 at 02:16:15AM +0200, Dhole wrote:
> On 08/31/2015 09:32 PM, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > Would be possible to drop the forked gettext and try to fix this in
> > the affected packages?
> 
> Hi Santiago, I saw that you have been working on the packages affected
> by the POT creation date timestamps in gettext mo files today so maybe
> you know this already, but just to be sure:
> The patched gettext has been dropped from our reproducible APT
> repository, and all the affected packages by the issue
> different_pot_creation_date_in_gettext_mo_files (formerly
> lc_messages_randomness) have been rebuilt in our jenkins setup, using
> the gettext version from Debian unstable:
> https://reproducible.debian.net/issues/unstable/different_pot_creation_date_in_gettext_mo_files_issue.html

Thanks a lot.

Yesterday I realized that gettext has already some things to avoid
this problem. For example:

/usr/share/gettext/po/remove-potcdate.sin
/usr/share/gettext/po/Makefile.in.in

When I had more time I'll try to put this in the Wiki somewhere, but
as a short summary (feel free to take any of this and open the wiki
page yourself), I would say:


The .po files inside a Debian source package are supposed to be
"final" for that particular Debian package version and should not need
to be "refreshed", "updated" or "msgmerged" at build time.


(Note that this is only a "matter of principles", finding a fix for
the offending packages might be not always trivial).