Bug#786644: reproducible builds should vary whether nocheck is added to DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Sun, 2015-05-24 at 11:42:31 +1000, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> > I'd expect that setting DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck on a package build
> > should not change the resulting binary packages. It might make the build
> > succeed despite being broken, but if it succeeds without nocheck, it
> > should be no different when enabled.
> 
> Policy is, however, silent on whether that is the correct behaviour or not. 

Policy is silent on many aspects of the distribution, in many cases
because they are obviously correct or buggy. Here I'd say the former.

> Clarifying policy as to what the correct behaviour should be seems to be a 
> necessary first step.

I don't see why, in this specific case less so when the request is
being done on a feature (reproducibility) that is neither in policy.

> That said, the policy editors are often interested in seeing scope of the 
> impact of any change and the only way of knowing how many packages would be 
> made instabuggy by this change is to include it in the tests...

The check does not impose anything on package maintainers, like
migration blocking or similar. So even if there was a substantial
amount of packages that would fail that test, it would still be useful
information for the reproducible effort IMO.

Thanks,
Guillem