Hello! Let me please first introduce myself, my name is Steffen and i am the maintainer/developer of the "SysV mail/BSD Mail/POSIX mailx" application S-nail, which is quite happy to have found a Debian maintainer with Paride Legovini just recently.
I try to make it short, but i want to say i am thankful for the spark that reproducible-build.org was for me. Even though i think it is a pity that $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is the sole indicator for reproducible environments, since now that programs can adapt.., but, well ... So that allowed for some generically known and accepted reproducible environment, and that is what i have implemented for S-nail, with a test framework that is built upon that. For i think years the Debian reproducibility of this MUA has therefore been a given fact for x86_64, but not for i386 and the ARM machines. At the beginning i looked, but found that the cause was on the Debian side and did not look any further no more. But last week Paride committed "fixes"[1] after having been prodded by some third party, and indeed, now S-nail is reproducible on all Debian test boxes. The fix was to set the built-in identification for the OS build environment to all "Debian", i.e., OS=debian OSENV=debian OSFULLSPEC=debian And at this point please let me quote something i have written to Paride. (Paride, i hope you do not mind that i quote myself!) And when i look at, e.g., [2], i see -behave:s_freeze-6: ok -behave:s_freeze-7: ok +behave:s_freeze-{6,7}: shell sets $TERM, skipped and this seems to be caused by +I: Adding a custom variable just for the fun of it... +I: Changing /bin/sh to bash ... And, of course, if there is a different kernel version, or a different uname(1) output as such, then how could a dumb end producer[consumer, the author] like S-nail deal with that? We hardwire those attributes into the binary, like many other programs do, e.g., "mutt(1) -v" output. ... Honestly, i do not think that having "Debian" as the sole identifier in output of for example "s-nail -Xversion -Xx" just to satisfy a broken reproducibility test can be useful. And to end with a quote, too: I mean, maybe it still is for Debian, and one could always ask for uname(1) output in a bug report, but .. let me wonder, please. (I am not subscribed, in case you start communication.) Ciao! [1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/s-nail/commit/c855c08b733e314b6f1823149bbff783f8017060 [2] https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/logdiffs/unstable/i386/s-nail_14.9.6-2.diff.gz --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)