binNMU or reproducible builds (choose only one)

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Hello.

I see "serious" bug reports asking for packages to drop
"dh_installdocs --link-doc" (see Bug #799316 for an example).

However, binNMUs break the reproducibility of the packages being
NMUed, since apparently the requirement of providing the *exact*
source code that was used for the *.deb is "relaxed" for the packages
being NMUed.

I wonder: Instead of forbidding "dh_installdocs --link-doc", which I
consider a useful feature that should not be dropped lightly, why
don't we just do source-full NMUs that do not change anything?

We could just append a .0 to the Debian version, so that foo 1.0-1
becomes 1.0-1.0 and allow the maintainer to skip this release from the
changelog for 1.0-2 (as we already do for the current binNMU suffixes).

Maybe I'm missing anything, but why do we *need* to break existing
dh_installdocs practice?

Thanks.