What do we really mean by "reproducible"?

[Santiago Vila]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 02:19:44PM +0000, Paul Sherwood wrote:
> On 2017-01-16 11:26, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > Before I use this rationale more times in some discussions out there,
> > I'd
> > like to be sure that there is a consensus.
> > 
> > What's the definition of reproducible? It is more like A or more like B?
> > 
> > A. Every time the package is attempted to build, the build succeeds,
> > and the same .deb are always created.
> 
> I may be wrong, but I believe that it's not possible to guarantee that the
> build succeeds every single time, even once we've locked all inputs to be in
> a known state. Cosmic rays would be one potential breakage, or corruption of
> a built intermediate artifact etc.

But I'm not speaking about cosmic rays or disk failures, but things
which are intrinsic to the package itself:

A very simple and funny example: Would we call a package having this
bug "reproducible"?

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=838828

(It has a mathematically-proved probability > 0 of failure).

Thanks.