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

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 09:05:04PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> 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.

According to the this definition of reproducibility a package that would
not build on a machine with 256 MB RAM would not be reproducible.

> Of course, this could be a bug in the wording,
>...

They just wanted to get something about reproducibility into policy,
the current wording is not a usable technical definition.

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed