Strange things with timestamps on Debian (sudo)

[Marc Haber]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 07:34:26AM +0100, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote:
> On 16/03/2022 17.54, Marc Haber wrote:
> > [tl;dr building with faketime yields Debian package with timestamps
> > different from building without faketime, causing reprotest to fail]
> 
> It might be a problem with how faketime works:
> https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime/issues/183
> 
> For openSUSE, I usually build in
> kvm -rtc base=2037-09-04T00:00:00
> 
> and still get reproducible sudo-1.9.9 package binaries.

I didn't fully understand that issue (and still don't), but did some
investigation in that direction. For some unknown reason, file that get
"manually" touched in debian/rules have their timestamp mangled in the
package when the build happens in faketime.

When a file is put into the package by the upstream build system (which
is called by debhelper) or by debhelper proper, the time stamps of the
package built under faketime match the ones that are in the package
built without faketime. This might be some debhelper magic that I don't
grasp yet, but I don't have an explanation for that behavior yet.

However, I was able to tweak packaging that no files need manual
handling in debian/rules any more, so that Debian's sudo now passes
reprotest fine.

I am open to hear explanations and am eager to learn.

Greetings
Marc

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