[Reproducible-builds] Bug#801376: dh-python: Different locales make Depends line to be sometimes python3.5, sometimes python3

[Santiago Vila]

Hi.

This bug is worse than I expected.

I have a set of ten packages affected by this problem. Every time I
test them, I get a different subset of reproducible and unreproducible
packages among them. This is the data I collected today:

aiozmq            No   No   Yes
debmake           No   No   No
doit              No   Yes  Yes
npm2deb           No   Yes  No
pafy              Yes  No   No
pudb              Yes  Yes  No
pygrib            No   Yes  No
python-3to2       Yes  Yes  No
python-odf        No   Yes  Yes
python-softlayer  No   No   No

The first column of Yes/No was this morning. The second column was
today around 14:20 UTC, the third one was today around 19:20 UTC.

"Yes" means "the package was built twice and in both cases the created .deb
packages were byte-by-byte identical".

"No" means "the package was built twice and the .deb packages were
different".


So, this still seems a bug in dh-python to me, but there should be
also some "random" ingredient in its inner working or in the affected
packages (parallel build?) to explain why dh-python does not seem to
behave deterministically.

Thanks.