Paul Wise writes ("Re: Rebuilds with unexpected timestamps"):
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 12:02 AM, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Could someone point me at some tools, or volunteer to help, or something ?
>
> Check out the wiki page about this:
> https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/ArchiveTesting
Oh, great, thanks.
> > What do people think ?
>
> You've found an interesting new class of weirdness in the archive.
Fun, eh? I only discovered this possibility because `git checkout'
takes no particular care about timestamps, and I found a package where
it so happened that my `git checkout' couldn't build although `apt-get
source' was fine. With hindsight it's obvious (ha ha ha).
Adrian Bunk writes ("Re: Rebuilds with unexpected timestamps"):
> Be prepared to see a lot of such issues when you touch random files.
I'm certainly expecting to see lots of issues.
IMO if a package FTBFS when its timestamps are permuted, that is
probably an RC bug. It means that there are some files in the
package, which it thinks it needs as part of the build process, but
which cannot actually be built.
If it does "sufficiently different" things, but still succeeds, when
the timestamps are permited then that's probably a minor or normal
bug: evidently it can build either way, but this kind of situation is
probably not intentional and it is setting us up for a future latent
FTBFS.
> If you want this to work properly, Debian has to move from using the
> generated release tarballs to the actual source in the upstream VCS.
If the upstream tarballs are sufficient and our clean target ensures
that everything is built from source, it can still work.
Ian.
