Bug#844431: Revised patch: Oppose

[Russ Allbery]

Bill Allombert <ballombe at debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 12:14:53PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> If you have specific wording suggestions that you believe would bring
>> this Policy requirement closer in line with what we're already doing in
>> the project (and which has gotten us to 94% reproducible already),
>> please make them.

> This percentage was reached mostly by fixing software tools (compiler,
> doc generators, packaging tools) to be deterministic, rather than by
> fixing individual packages. This is a topic that is wholy absent from
> policy.

Indeed.  There are many things that go into making Debian work that are
wholly absent from Policy.  Hopefully, over time, we can slowly reduce
that, but there will always be new initiatives that aren't documented.

> For example policy could mandate that programs that set timestamps
> honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

Please propose language.  (Ideally in a separate bug, since this one is
already quite large and it's easier to address specific issues in specific
bugs.)

I'm not opposed to adding more advice and requirements that make sense,
but there are lots of things in Policy that aren't as fully described as
they possibly could be if people did more work.  I'm not willing to block
this on having the perfect language, but if you want to contribute, you're
absolutely welcome to do so.

Most packages do not have to care about SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH because it's set
by dpkg-buildpackage and consumed by the tools that are most frequently
relevant, but I'd be very happy to see that documented in Policy for the
packages that do care.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>