[Reproducible-builds] debugedit and reproducible builds

[Jérémy Bobbio]

Stéphane Glondu:
> Le 20/02/2014 09:19, Jérémy Bobbio a écrit :
> >> (Alternative-2) Another alternative to debugedit could be to use proot,
> >> with a binding that puts the source tree at its canonical location, then
> >> builds the package in the faked /usr/src. […]
> > 
> > To me, this falls in the same kind of tricks than libfaketime. I'd
> > rather not go that road.
> 
> Even as a first step? There are still many remaining failures even with
> faked /usr/src. Those should be sorted out anyway, so why not start with
> that first?
> 
> Currently, I am rebuilding all the unidentified issues in [1] with the
> proot trick and there are actually many packages that build identically.
> 
> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/Rebuild20140126
> 
> The original list of unidentified issues was big in my opinion, so I
> want to reduce it as automatically as possible.
> 
> I realized that we could just directly build packages twice directly in
> /usr/src and compare them instead of using proot... I will do that in my
> next iteration of the rebuilding script. Again: here, my goal is to
> reduce the number of packages to look at as a first step to reproducibility.

That makes a lot of sense.

> Also: to me, proot is closer to fakeroot that libfaketime. It replaces
> constants things with other constant things. AFAIU, libfaketime is more
> invasive as it replaces a non-deterministically-varying thing with a
> constant thing.

I follow you.

The policy currently mandates that the `binary` target of debian/rules
be called as root (Policy 4.9), mentioning that fakeroot is one way to
achieve that.

This actually does not sound too unreasonable to add a requirement that
the binary target must be called from `/usr/src/$SOURCE`. Especially if
there's a tool as easy as fakeroot to do that…

-- 
Lunar                                .''`. 
lunar at debian.org                    : :Ⓐ  :  # apt-get install anarchism
                                    `. `'` 
                                      `-   
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