Bug#1117626: reprotest: Use the Continent/City (zoneinfo) syntax for time zone variation

[Guillem Jover]

On Wed, 2025-10-08 at 15:10:49 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 8, 2025 1:41:17 PM Mountain Standard Time Guillem Jover 
> wrote:
> > As was mentioned on the list thread, this change would require for tzdata
> > to be installed everywhere, otherwise the results are bogus (AFAIUI).
> 
> There may be some great difficulty caused by making tzdata a dependency of 
> reprotest.  If there is I would be interested in know what it is.

Adding tzdata as a dependency to reprotest would not affect what gets
installed in the chroots where the packages get built. Forcibly
injecting that in the chroots would be wrong in so many ways, when we
have made it possible to not need to have it installed in buildds (or
as part of the build-essential transitive set) by default.

> It should be noted that the reproducible builds project successfully builds 
> this package.

> https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/
> pyinstaller-hooks-contrib.html
> 
> My memory is that didn’t used to be the case.  So, either my memory is wrong 
> or reproducible builds recently started using the Continent/City (zoneinfo) 
> syntax.  In either case, I think it would be advantageous for reprotest (and 
> the Salsa CI test that uses it) to mirror the behavior of reproducible builds.

Given that tzdata is not installed unless (build-)depended on
explicitly, using the Continent/City notation seems wrong for the
reproducible-builds to be setting it like that.

But in any case if that package fails to build when the current
timezone is set to a valid value that the package does not support,
then that is definitely a bug in that package that should be fixed.
Trying to force the build/test (or user) systems to use another format
is not reasonable.

I'll be failing a FTBFS bug against pyinstaller-hooks-contrib once
I've confirmed it locally.

Thanks,
Guillem