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

[Soren Stoutner]

On Thursday, October 9, 2025 12:00:09 AM Mountain Standard Time Guillem Jover 
wrote:
> 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.

As noted earlier, it builds and tests fine in Debian’s official reproducible 
builds.  I would assume that means that the tzdata package is installed and 
that the timezone modifications are done using the Continent/City (zoneinfo) 
syntax when reproducible builds are run.

I was under the impression that reprotest desired to produce the same results 
as the official reproducible builds.  Is that not correct?

-- 
Soren Stoutner
soren at debian.org
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