Re: discrepancies between uploaded and source-built .deb

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Karl Chen <quarl@NOSPAM.quarl.org> wrote:

> Hi, 
>
> I'm doing something that involves building every Debian package,
> and I'm finding (usually minor) discrepancies between what I build
> from source packages, and the binary packages uploaded by
> maintainers.  I'm building each package in its own chroot which
> contains only the minimum packages (bootstrap + build-essential +
> build-dependencies).
>
> Are such things considered bugs?

That depends on what the discrepancy is.  Many generated files
(compiled, or typeset documentation) contain some timestamp, or the name
of the host on which they were built.  Of course this will change
between two builds, and is perfectly normal.

It is still annoying, however, if you want to check if a particular
change in some package breaks the building of other ones - if they don't
FTBFS, you have to be very careful to spot the actual differences
without getting many false positives.  I'm currently undertaking a
similar effort; but have not gotten much beyond the manual state.  What
little automation I have is at 

http://cvs.debian.org/tetex-common/comparebuild?rev=1.1&cvsroot=tetex&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

What do you do to look at the differences?

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer