[Reproducible-builds] Adding a 'c' build to test with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck ?

[Chris Lamb]

Hi all,

I just ran into yet another package where the contents can vary
depending on whether the tests are run or not.

As an example, without tests a given Python package entirely vanilla and
is thus reproducible in our toolchain. However, executing the tests
creates various intermediary files that are genuinely useful (eg.
compiled versions of grammars, not .pyc files). These files are then
installed to the binary package.

I'm only really discovering these when these files themselves are
unreproducible/non-deterministic, otherwise they are completely
invisible.

So, does this matter to us? It's strictly more of a general QA issue if
we are declare that DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS does not contain nocheck from an
reproducibility PoV.. but on the other hand, our testing framework would
make this almost trivial to detect.

(Why another build? Whilst adding `nocheck` to our current `b` build
could work, it would be a bad regression as I would dearly miss having
the tests run in an exotic locale and timezone, etc., hence proposing a
`c` build).


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-