Updating dpkg-buildflags to enable reproducible=+fixfilepath by default

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer perezmeyer at gmail.com
Fri Jan 8 13:29:37 GMT 2021


Hi! Sorry for this late reply, but it just came into my view.

On Fri, 13 Nov 2020 at 17:40, Vagrant Cascadian
<vagrant at reproducible-builds.org> wrote:
>
> On 2020-11-13, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> > On 2020-10-27, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant at reproducible-builds.org> wrote:
> >> Though, of course, identifying the exact reproducibility problem would
> >> be preferable. One of the common issues is test suites relying on the
> >> behavior of __FILE__ returning a full path to find fixtures or other
> >> test data.
> >
> > has QFIND_TESTDATA been adapted to work with this, or are we just
> > "lucky" that most packages don't actually build and run test suites?
>
> Yes, QFINDTESTDATA is one of the primary (only?) issues with test suites
> found in about 20-30 packages in the archive, according to the
> archive-wide rebuild that was performed. For most of those packages
> patches have been submitted, and some are already either fixed or marked
> as pending.

But QFINDTESTDATA is using __FILE__ in a valid way. It might not be
what you are expecting, but still a valid usage.

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=876901 We have
discussed this before.


> If it could be fixed at the core for QFINDTESTDATA, that would be nicer
> than fixing 20-30 packages individually, though we're not there right
> now.

In that case I would expect a valid patch from the people interested
in enabling this. In the meantime the dpkg change broke a very valid
usage. Inconvenient for reproducibility? yes, probably, but still very
valid.

Oh, and changing this just before freeze is also something not
acceptable considering I have seen no valid path proposed for
QFINDTESTDATA yet. You are breaking something that it's expected to
work.

So please revert the change in dpkg. After this release we can
definitely wait for someone producing a patch for QFINDTESTDATA, test
it and go ahead wth the change.



-- 
Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
http://perezmeyer.com.ar/
http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com/



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