Re: [policy] [PATCH] Fix one call to gzip that was missing -n

[Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 12:38:07AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> ---
>  debian/rules | 2 +-
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/debian/rules b/debian/rules
> index 2a3a76e..59b5679 100755
> --- a/debian/rules
> +++ b/debian/rules
> @@ -174,7 +174,7 @@ stamp-binary: stamp-build
>  #
>  # Compress files and build MD5 checksums.
>  #
> -	gzip -f9 $(DOCDIR)/*.sgml $(DOCDIR)/changelog
> +	gzip -f9 -n $(DOCDIR)/*.sgml $(DOCDIR)/changelog
>  	gzip -f9 -n $(DOCDIR)/*.txt
>  	@set -ex; cd debian/tmp; \
>  	find . -path './DEBIAN' -prune -o -type f -printf '%P\0' \

This is not needed, these files are not generated at build time, they are
simply copied to the build directory using 'install -p', which preserve
the timestamp, so the embedded timestamp inside the gzip file is the timestamp
of the original files, which is consistent across builds.

If you look at my patch, you see that I specifically special-cased *.sgml and
changelog for that reason:

-       gzip -f9 $(DOCDIR)/*.txt $(DOCDIR)/*.sgml $(DOCDIR)/changelog
+       gzip -f9 $(DOCDIR)/*.sgml $(DOCDIR)/changelog
+       gzip -f9 -n $(DOCDIR)/*.txt

I applaud the work on reproducible build, but we should not remove timestamps
in the name of reproducibility when they do not affect reproducibility.
They still carry some amount of information.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.