> Wiadomość napisana przez James Addison <[email protected]> w dniu > 21.02.2024, o godz. 15:49: > > Source: snapd > Version: 2.61.1-1 > Severity: wishlist > > Dear Maintainer, > > I'm an occasional volunteer with the Reproducible Builds[1] project, and > recently noticed that the snapd package failed automated reproducible build > testing[2] on Debian. > > One cause of non-reproducibility for the package appears to be that the > snap.8 manual page (compressed as snap.8.gz) contains a timestamp in the > header that becomes timezone-localized, meaning that the Debian binary > packages > built may vary based on the timezone they're built in. > > Although one way to fix this could be to request and display a UTC timestamp, > there's a comment[3] in the debian/rules file that hints at a better solution: > from version 1.4.0-2 of golang-go-flags there is in-built support[4] for the > SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable, a time-in-seconds since the Unix epoch > (interpreted > in UTC[5]). > > That means that it should be possible to generate reproducible manual pages > directly by calling the compiled snap binary with the 'help --man' commandline > arguments, omitting the sed expression as suggested by the comment. > > I'll offer a merge request on Salsa to provide that change soon.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention and for offering a patch. I was aware of numerous TODOs in the packaging but have not yet managed to come up with a solution that would work both upstream and downstream (snapd CI system uses a copy of the debian packaging to check that a package can indeed be built), so any iteration on this is rather tedious. In any case that should not be a problem that cannot be solved. I'm looking forward to your pull request or patches. Best regards ZK
