[Reproducible-builds] Reproducibility of apt-listbugs

[Reiner Herrmann]

Hi Francesco,

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 07:23:45PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
> I am the maintainer of apt-listbugs and I have recently noticed that it
> was not built reproducibly [1]. The issue seemed to be due to the month
> and year inserted by rdtool into the man page.

We already have an issue for rdtool [1]. And yes, it is hard to detect,
as it only embeds month/year, which we currently don't vary.

> However, now it seems to be built reproducibly [2].
> I am not sure the underlying issue has been really fixed, though: maybe
> the recent tests just did not change the month in the build date?!?
> 
> Is this something that should be fixed in rdtool [3]? If this is the
> case, could you please file a bug report against rdtool?
> Otherwise, what should be done?

Yes, you are right. This is something that should be fixed in rdtool,
probably by adding support there for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH [2].
When we are really varying the month in the future, we will probably
see much more of those issues, which we now see only when two builds
are happening by chance in a different month.

Kind regards,
 Reiner

[1]: https://reproducible.debian.net/issues/unstable/timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_rdtool_issue.html
[2]: https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/

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