[Reproducible-builds] Best approach to strip timestamp in postscript files

[Reiner Herrmann]

Hi Alexis,

On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 03:07:42PM +0200, Alexis Bienvenüe wrote:
> I prepared [1] patches for imagemagick and transfig which make
> reproducibility issues with kannel.
> I also prepared a patch for kannel itself [2]. With this patch, kannel
> does not build reproducibly in the experimental toolchain, but it does
> when adding patched imagemagick and transfig to the toolchain.

I just had a look at your patches and have a few suggestions:

kannel_1.4.4-2_reproducible.diff:
> + #ifdef __GNUC__ 
> +-             (__DATE__ " " __TIME__) ,
> ++             "unknown" ,
> +              __VERSION__,
> + #else 

Instead of replacing __DATE__ and __TIME__ with "unknown", I would
just remove it. Displaying "unknown" to the user isn't really helpful.

And you also patch configure.in _and_ configure.
Couldn't you use dh-autoreconf to regenerate configure automatically?

The imagemagick/transfig patches look good to me, though you could
make it a bit more robust by checking if strtoull was actually
successfully parsing an integer.

> Should I report a bug to kannel to include the patch?
> Since I am not experienced, can anyone have a look at these patches and
> help me to improve them or to find them their way?

I would suggest to submit the patches to the BTS [1].

Awesome work, thanks for working on those issue! :)

Regards,
  Reiner

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/Contribute#How_to_report_bugs
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