Bug#932795: How to handle FTBFS bugs in release architectures

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Quoting Debian Policy:

 Packages should build reproducibly, which for the purposes of this
 document [19] means that given

    a version of a source package unpacked at a given path;
    a set of versions of installed build dependencies;
    a set of environment variable values;
    a build architecture; and
    a host architecture,
		    
 repeatedly building the source package for the build architecture on
 any machine of the host architecture with those versions of the build
 dependencies installed and exactly those environment variable values
 set will produce bit-for-bit identical binary packages.


So, according to this definition, if we can find a set of environment
variable values and installed build-dependencies and a machine for
which the package does not build at all (as I happen to find from time
to time), then repeatedly building the source package in such machine
will certainly not produce bit-for-bit identical binary packages,
because it will not produce any binary packages at all, and therefore
the package will not be reproducible by definition.

Of course, this could be a bug in the wording, but if we really meant
that the packages only need to be identical when they are actually
produced, the wording should be like this instead:

 repeatedly building the source package will either produce a build
 failure or bit-for-bit identical binary packages.

I guess this is not the type of reproducibility we should aim for.

Thanks.