[Request for help] Making brian reproducible

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2021-06-08, Nilesh Patra wrote:
> I was trying to make "brian" package reproducible. To my understanding it has two problems:
>
> * use datetime.date.today() and similar stuff for build documentation - I suppose I fixed these with using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH

Your fixes look reasonable; just be sure the way you're passing the time
is independent of timezone (it might be fine as is).


> * Only _some_ files in the documentation it vendors has stuff (like tags, examples, links) in random order across different builds.
> By the looks of it, it seems this randomness is due to the way data is being inserted into files with the brian2/sphinxext/generate_examples.py script,
> but I am having trouble figuring it out beyond this point.

Wild hunch, can you trying forcing the locale in debian/rules...

  export LANG=C.UTF-8 LC_ALL=C.UTF-8


There are a long list of issues related to sphinx, none of which look
exactly like what you have based on the descriptions, but might be close
enough to be worth tagging your package with randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_sphinx:

  https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/reproducible-notes/-/blob/b0211037be80220ff0941475846840e8dc796fbf/issues.yml#L470

Or maybe one of the others.


I think sphinx is one of the documentation generation toolchains that if
we fixed some reproducibility issues in, it would fix quite a few of the
remaining unreproducible packages!


> I'd really appreciate any help here.

Try running reprotest with the --auto-build flag, which tries a build
varying only one thing at a time. It performs two normalized builds, and
if they are reproducible, it can usually identify what variations
trigger the problem... on a good day. :)


live well,
  vagrant
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