James Addison
2024-10-14 20:40:01 UTC
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PermalinkVersion: 1.9
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
User: reproducible-***@lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: timestamps
Control: affects -1 developers-reference
Dear Maintainer,
I'm an occasional volunteer contributor to the Reproducible Builds[1] project,
and recently noticed that the developers-reference package failed to build
deterministically on the test build infrastructure for Debian.
The difference in the build output appears in Debian release codenames
retrieved using the distro_info module in the python3-distro-info package.
In particular, varying system clock times during comparative builds can cause
the release codenames returned by distro-info to differ, due to date-based
filtering logic that uses datetime.date.today (system clock date) as a default
value.
Please find attached a patch to begin using the stable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH[3]
build timestamp, when configured, as a source of the default date filter,
enabling repeatable and deterministic build output. (I'll also offer this as
a merge request on Salsa)
Regards,
James
[1] - https://reproducible-builds.org
[2] - https://sources.debian.org/src/distro-info/1.9/python/distro_info.py/#L129
[3] - https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/source-date-epoch/