Bug#1004939: debhelper: Drop -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=on in compat v14

[Vagrant Cascadian]

Package: debhelper
Version: 13.6
Severity: normal
User: reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: buildpath toolchain
X-Debbugs-Cc: Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant at reproducible-builds.org>, reproducible-bugs at lists.alioth.debian.org

The debhelper compat level v14 is still experimental, and I think it
might be worth dropping -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=on, as there are cases where
it actually can trigger build failures, while
-DCMAKE_BUILD_PATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON can provide all of the reproducibility
benefits, with less liklihood to trigger build failures.

From the debhelper manpage:

  The cmake buildsystem now passes -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=ON and
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON to cmake(1) to avoid some
  reproducibility issues.

  This can cause issues with running binaries directly from the build
  directories as they might now require a manually set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
  If you need to override this change, we recommend that you try to pass
  the -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=OFF option first to see if that fixes the
  problem (leaving CMAKE_BUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN at its new default).
  This should undo the need for LD_LIBRARY_PATH and avoid the
  reproducibility issues on Linux, where $ORIGIN is supported by the
  runtime linkers.

If -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=ON was not included in the first place, this
latter section could be dropped and it would be easier for affected
package maintainers to adopt debhelper v14 (e.g. not having to
explicitly override the default with -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=OFF) while still
gaining the reproducibility benefits.

I am not aware of cases where having -DCMAKE_BUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON
but not -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=ON triggers reproducibility issues.

Are there issues with embedding relative RPATHs as
-DCMAKE_BUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON does, or other strong reasons to
exclude RPATH entirely by default?


live well,
  vagrant
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