Bug#844431: Revised patch: seeking seconds

[Adrian Bunk]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 01:00:00PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>...
> This in absolutely no way constrains the reproducible build team from
> working on raising the bar in the future, just as the absence of this
> language from Policy did not prevent them from starting to work on this
> problem four years ago.  They should continue to work on making package
> builds more reproducible and raising the bar for reproducibility as makes
> sense for their goals and judging the impact of that.  Once any new
> requirements reach maturity and look feasible and have some project
> committment, we'll change Policy to set a new baseline for the whole
> project.  But the reproducible builds work should not *wait* for that, and
> should definitely push forward and experiment just as they have up until
> now.
>...

This is not about experimenting for raising the bar in the future.

This is about the reproducible builds team not using policy as a stick 
for claiming a bar higher than what policy actually defines.

Is it really allowed to claim that a package is not reproducible,
when it actually is reproducible according to policy?

Let me explain with examples how this information is presented 
to maintainers:

Tracker:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hsqldb1.8.0
"Does not build reproducibly during testing"

DDPO:
https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-openoffice@lists.debian.org
red "unrep" entries

Maintainer dashboard:
https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?email1=debian-openoffice%40lists.debian.org
red "(un)reproducible" entries [1]

Let's look at the mdds package, that has red unreproducible entries in
the maintainer dashboard:
https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/mdds.html

mdds is unreproducible only in sid since more things (including the 
build path) are varied there. The information behind "differences"
confirms that the build path is the only issue.

According to policy, mdds is reproducible.

Unless policy is supposed to be completely detached from reality,
the criteria for claiming in various places that a package is 
unreproducible have to match the policy definition of reproducibility.

cu
Adrian

[1] the FTBFS entries are actually problems in the reproducible infrastructure

-- 

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       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
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