[Reproducible-builds] Building packages in the *past* (!!)

[Santiago Vila]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 10:57:20AM +0100, Chris Lamb wrote:
> > There is a minimum of sanity that we should assume on the autobuilders,
> 
> Agree in principle..
> 
> > namely, that packages are built on a date which is later than the one
> > in the last changelog entry.
> 
> .. but why should this matter? In fact, there's a fairly strong argument
> to be made that if the package does something weird in this case then
> there's something far deeper wrong or broken with it - and therefore it
> would be advantageous to know about it simply from a QA point of view.

No. There is nothing wrong or broken in base-files, and the current
tests are making it *gratuitously* to fail.

Please *follow* the link I posted before and see it for yourself.

If the (simplified for this discussion) standard

find debian/tmp -newermt '$(BUILD_DATE)' | xargs touch --date='$(BUILD_DATE)'

is not going to work anymore, then there is literally *no* easy way to
differentiate between files which have been created during the build
process and files that come from upstream and we want their timestamp
to be kept untouched.

If we put constraints on maintainers and packages that are beyond what
it is reasonable, nobody will take us seriously.