[Reproducible-builds] dropping texlive from our archive

[Mattia Rizzolo]

Hi humans.

I'd like to take a deeper stab at texlive.

The current status is: nearly everything was merged, but one patch.
https://anonscm.debian.org/git/reproducible/texlive-bin.git/tree/debian/patches/source-date-epoch-tex-primitives-defaults-to-1?id=c6dede514f6c724228ad6bbaa90531b27e78f1eb
That patch is basically what makes \today reproducible follow S_D_E
always instead of when somebody enables it with Yet Another Env Var.

As HW42 pointed out on IRC what's left to us is:
 1) convice upstream
 2) convince Debian maintainer
 3) manualy fix packages
 4) export a tex specific variable in debhelper

In my opinion:
1+2 were already tried, with very poor results, with both upstream and
debian maintainer not interested at all at even listening to us.
We could still try again though.

4 is a very very ugly thing which would set a very bad precendent for
debhelper.

3 is instead a reasonable choice: according to my codesearch.d.n lookup
there are 149 packages¹ with '\today' somewhere in their code.
I expect that way less than half of them are actually going to effect
output, but I'm going to put my idea of worst case here to half: 75
packages.  It would still be a reasonable enough number of packages to
fix.

I think that before going to make a choice on it (even if that choice is
"prod upstream some more") we should try to move aside the patched
texlive-bin package from our archive and see how many packages are
actually affected by this.



¹ the list of the resulting packages are attached to this email, would
be nice if somebody could check it against reproducible.json (thing that
I'd do before dropping texlive-bin to be able to compare the results).

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
more about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
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