On Tue, 15 Aug 2023 at 09:21:22 -0400, Boyuan Yang wrote: > I am looking for advice in handling these MBF reports against packages that do > irreversible changes to the source files during build every time (such as > updating timestamp). A broad category would be packages using Gettext + PO > combination with /usr/share/gettext/po/Makefile.in.in involved / embedded, > where .po file that contains translation is updated every time, causing dpkg- > source to complain the diff and quit when building twoce in a row.
Translation files like these are traditionally a hybrid of source file and derived file: they're source that is edited by hand, but they are also updated programmatically during the build. If you are not going to modify those files yourself (other than possibly via patches in debian/patches/), I think the most reasonable thing to do is to tell dpkg-source to ignore any local modifications and keep using the version of them from the upstream source code, something like this: https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/shell-extensions/gnome-shell-extension-caffeine/-/commit/7fbdf1c82d824978d6e2161e479cca817e38db6b (in most packages they'll be closer to the top level, perhaps in a po/ directory, but GNOME Shell extensions have an unusual directory layout) This is not, strictly speaking, Policy-compliant, but Policy is a tool for making a high-quality distribution, not a stick to beat people with; and doing a backup/restore workflow (like dh_autoreconf does) would be a significant amount of work for no concrete benefit that I can see. smcv
