[Reproducible-builds] Weird localedef failures

[Esa Peuha]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Santiago Vila <sanvila at debian.org> wrote:
> The locales package is not build-essential so packages using it during
> the build need a build-depends on it.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

> For the same reason (not being build-essential), it is ok that it's
> not pre-installed in pbuilder chroot, and in fact, usually it's not.

Huh? How is the second build supposed to be able to set the locale to
fr_CH without the locales package?

> For example, it's not here:
>
> https://reproducible.debian.net/buildinfo/unstable/amd64/base-files_9.4_amd64.buildinfo

A .buildinfo file doesn't (and isn't meant to) list all installed
packages, only those that are actually needed for the build.

> If you can verify that installing the locales package fixes the error,
> then it would be clearly a "missing build-depends: locales" bug.

No, that is not the problem. If you look at

https://reproducible.debian.net/rbuild/unstable/amd64/apertium-en-ca_0.9.3~r61232-1.rbuild.log

you can see that locales is in the Build-Depends list, but pbuilder
doesn't try to install it, so either there is something wrong with
the installed packages database (which would be a bug in our pbuilder
setup) or locales is installed but some of its files are somehow
inaccessible (which would also be a bug in our pbuilder setup).