Package: devscripts Version: 2.25.15 Dear maintainer:
The debrebuild tool, used by reproduce.debian.net, is unable to rebuild the smartlist package. https://reproduce.debian.net/amd64/api/v0/builds/315659/log ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- gcc -g -O2 -Werror=implicit-function-declaration -ffile-prefix-map=/build/reproducible-path/smartlist-3.15=. -fstack-protector-strong -fstack-clash-protection -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fcf-protection -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 multigram.o sublib.o ecommon.o mcommon.o hsort.o lastdirsep.o -o multigram -Wl,-z,relro -lm -lc make[2]: Leaving directory '/build/reproducible-path/smartlist-3.15/src' Can't access /build/reproducible-path/smartlist-3.15/debian/tmp/var/list, are you sure it's there? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think the root cause of this is insufficient permissions in some of the directories required to reach /build/reproducible-path/smartlist-3.15/debian/tmp/var/list This is a problem which I found in the past, and there was even a comment in debian/rules about it, which I will quote below: # Important note: Make sure that all directories in # `pwd`/debian/tmp/var/list are world-readable. # Otherwise you may get this strange error: # "Can't access /var/list, are you sure it's there?" # I got this error because my home directory was mode 700. # Simply chmod 755 it and this will work. CC="$(CC)" CFLAGS0="$(CFLAGS0)" LDFLAGS0="$(LDFLAGS0)" \ SmartList/install.sh `pwd`/debian/tmp/var/list /var/list In version 3.15-25 from 2015-08-30, i.e. nearly ten years ago, those comments were removed with this changelog entry: * debian/rules: Drop obsolete comments and set permissions in a more straightforward way. Hopefully the package is reproducible now. So, while it's possible that we could avoid this problem to happen by some minor change in debian/rules, I would consider this as a bug in debrebuild, because this is not a hardware issue and the package builds ok in buildd.debian.org: https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=smartlist and also in Salsa CI: https://salsa.debian.org/sanvila/smartlist/-/pipelines and the comments in debian/rules were removed when it was clear that they were not needed anymore. In other words, I think debrebuild is breaking some common assumptions, which I would consider reasonable, about the way packages should be built. (Cc: Holger, as I asked him about this weird issue first) Thanks.
