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

[Philip Hands]

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

> On 2022-09-14, Philip Hands wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Fair point! 
>
>> 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?
>
> True, though it may make things harder to verify reproducibility in
> practice, especially if it is a fairly "normal" variation that triggers
> the issue...
>
>
> It is a balancing act...
>
> I guess I'd be fine with the defaults to go either way, but it would be
> important to be able to enable or disable however this gets implemented.

Absolutely.  That's why I was requesting that it be a variation in its
own right, since that should allow one to specify:

  --variations=-nocheck

and get a normal (with checks) build in the varied scenario.

BTW If someone can give me a hint where in the code one would define
such a variation I'll cheerfully give it a go myself, but sadly it seems
that my python is too weak to find the right spot for myself.

Cheers, Phil.
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