#862112: r-base-dev: Generate reproducible output independently of the build path

[Ximin Luo]

Holger Levsen:
> control: found -1 3.4.0-1
> control: notfound -1 3.4.0-1.0~reproducible2
> 
> Hi Dirk,
> 
> I've asked Ximin to file this bug so that we have something to track and to
> refer in discussions…
> 
> you wrote:
> 
>> At work now with limited time, but I think I already told you twice that
>> there were two of the three parts of the patch you proposed to upstream that
>> I would not take, were I upstream (which I am not).
> 
> Dirk, could you please point out (here in this bug report) which of the two parts
> you consider unsuitable?
> 

We talked about this over private email, this refers to the patch hunks in:

- src/library/tools/R/admin.R
- src/library/tools/R/parseRd.R

The suggestion was to guard them behind a command-line option using getOption, so presumably Debian could set this whilst upstream / other distros do not.

However, since I'm not familiar with the full R codebase I was waiting to see if upstream had any further comments, because even with the getOption() change there might be other consequences that I didn't foresee. In this case it would be beneficial for Debian's behaviour to exactly match upstream, so we get the same bugs (if any).

> Ximin, looking at https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/reproducible/r-base.git/log/?h=pu/reproducible_builds
> I believe it would be best to merge those two (top most) commits into one?
> 
>> A decent longer-term strategy may well to stress-test the patch by including
>> it in our builds for a while.  We can work on that.
> 
> actually we've been using Ximin's patches on tests.reproducible-builds.org
> since the 2nd of May on amd64 and since the 3rd on arm64, armhf and i386.
> 
> According to https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/index_performance.html
> (top row labeled "oldest build result) in the first table on the right) this
> means we've almost done a full rebuild with the patch on amd64+arm64 (probably
> 85% done now) and pretty close to that on i386…
> 
> According to this, this patch seems to work well…
> 

The patch works well for getting stuff built, but I haven't tested all of the *behaviour* of these packages. (Some probably have unit tests, but these don't cover everything at any rate.) That is why I wanted to wait for upstreams' comments first, before adding the getOption guards - which are relatively minor IMO, compared to what the full patch does.

I also haven't tested other potential tools that might process R rdb files, who might for some reason expect absolute build paths.

X

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