[rb-general] Wished field in buildinfo files (debian)

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2018-12-07, Juan Picca wrote:
> About the fields listed in the buildinfo files [1], has sense to ask
> for the inclusion of a field with the date of the build and the
> distribution used to use with snapshot.debian.org?

The build date may have little to no correlation with the set of
software used to do the build...


> Rationale:
> To reproduce a package (manually for now) maybe is convenient and easy
> for the creation of the schroot used by sbuild an url based in s.d.o
> with the timestamp of the build and the distribution used.
>
> Example:
> For example in the buildinfo file for 0ad [2] I would like a field
> similar to (name can change):
>
> Build-Snapshot: /archive/debian/20181203T153211Z testing

The official Debian buildds do not use snapshots.debian.org, and may not
even be up to date with the current packages in sid/testing/stable,
etc.

So you can only really guess at this information; there's no way to
programatically know which appropriate snapshot was used- in fact, there
may not even be a single snapshot which captures all of the packages
used in the build.

If you're doing a rebuild, I could see this as a useful hint to other
rebuilders, if you happen to use one or more Snapshots in the build, it
would be useful to record that information. But it would have to be
added after dpkg generates the .buildinfo; I doubt you'll be able to get
that sort of code into dpkg.


> Pros:
> This is a direct field to use instead of following the steps:
>
> 1. Convert the Build-Date from "Tue, 04 Dec 2018 11:35:52 +1400" to
> "20181203T213552Z" (iso8601)
> 2. Find in https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/?year=2018&month=12
> the snapshot for that date, in this example "20181203T153211Z"
> 3. Find the distribution in the corresponding changelog file [3] for
> the package version: unstable

So I definitely see value in recording this information for rebuilders,
but I don't think it will be plausible to add for builds that do not use
snapshots.debian.org.

It's also possible to re-build a package with a different distribution
in the changelog file, though this is rare.


live well,
  vagrant
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