Bug#1019742: reprotest: add a variation that sets DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck

[Philip Hands]

Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant at reproducible-builds.org> writes:

>> but also
>> (given that the tests will have passed during the normal build) the tests
>> failing during the varied build seems unlikely to be identifying faults that are
>> worth fixing, and so is just a waste of cycles.
>
> How do you know weather the bugs it is identifying are worth fixing? It
> could also identify non-deterministic failures, or failures triggered by
> specific build environment configurations...

The point is that if the package is reproducible, then the fact that its
tests fail when run in a weird environment (that may never be found in
the wild) seems rather likely to be finding errors in the tests rather
than errors in the program that gets shipped.

Even if busybox's du really does have a bug where it miscounts the sizes
of files when run under the fileordering variation, I'm not sure that
breaking the ability to confirm that the package is reproducible is
justified in order to find that bug.

I'm afraid I've not yet managed to work out what's behind the
mis-counting, but my first guess is that it's more likely to be
something in the fuse system presenting the data than in du's counting
of it.

Of course, if the package is not reproducible, the tests may well fail
because the package ends up containing new bugs that are only present in
the variant-built package, but then its also going to show up as
non-reproducible, so does that really make a difference?

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
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