[Reproducible-builds] Bug#833340: mini-buildd: please make the build reproducible

[Boyuan Yang]

Control: user reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org
Control: usertags -1 environment
X-Debbugs-Cc: reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org

2016-08-03 20:14 GMT+08:00 Chris Lamb <lamby at debian.org>:
> - default=os.getenv("HOME"),
> + default="$HOME",
>
> Unless I'm missing something, this won't work as $VARS are not expanded
> in Python..
>
> (What you probably want to do is set the default to ~/.mini-buildd and
> patch the callsites to use os.path.expanduser at "real" runtime.)

I intended to use "$HOME" string literally since I did not come up
with a better solution. :-(

The original author used os.getenv() in python argparse, so the output
of `mini-buildd --help' really depend on $HOME env var. Unfortunately
the man page is generated using help2man (or similar tool) [1] during
building process and reproducible build website will alter $HOME env
var to test reproducibility. So in my opinion there is no better
option except fixed text string. Mini-buildd script won't and
shouldn't detect if itself is running for help2man or for end-user.

[1] https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/armhf/diffoscope-results/mini-buildd.html

Thanks,
Boyuan