Two questions about build-path reproducibility in Debian

[David A. Wheeler]

> On Mar 12, 2024, at 11:45 AM, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant at reproducible-builds.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2024-03-12, Holger Levsen wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 06:24:22PM +0000, James Addison via rb-general wrote:
>>> Please find below a draft of the message I'll send to each affected bugreport.
>> 
>> looks good to me, thank you for doing this!
>> 
>>> Note: I confused myself when writing this; in fact Salsa-CI reprotest _does_
>>> continue to test build-path variance, at least until we decide otherwise.
>> 
>> this is in fact a bug and should be fixed with the next reprotest release.
> 
> That is not a reprotest bug, but an infrastructure issue for the
> debian-specific salsa-ci configuration. Reprotest is not a
> debian-specific tool.
> 
> Reprotest should continue to vary build paths by default; reprotest
> historically and currently defaults to enabling all variations and
> making an exception does not seem worth the opinionated change of
> behavior. By design, reprotest is easy to configure which variations to
> enable and disable as needed.

This makes sense. If programs can build reproducibly while varying the build-path,
reproducible builds are easier to create, and that's a good thing even if not
strictly required.

--- David A. Wheeler