Bug#844431: Revised patch: seeking seconds

[Russ Allbery]

Bill Allombert <ballombe at debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 09:36:04AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Note that, for most developers, this is pretty much equivalent to the
>> current situation with FTBFS on, say, s390 architectures.  Or even
>> issues with running under whichever init system is not the one the
>> maintainer personally uses.

> Debian provides porter box for that purpose. This means if your package
> FTBFS on s390 you can login to a s390 porter box, use sbuild to set up a
> build environment, fix the problem and then check the package now build
> correctly.

> Now compare with reproducible build. You get some error report you
> cannot reproduce, do some change following the help provided and hope
> for the best. Then some day later you get the same error report.

This hasn't been my experience with reproducible build bug reports.  Once
there's a bug report of unreproducibility under some specific situation,
I've always been able to reproduce it by doing multiple builds with that
specific variation and seeing how the output changes.

I agree that this may not always be the case, but it's also not always the
case that one can reproduce an s390 buildd failure on a porter box.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>