[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#843773: Bug#843773: misleading timestamps in binnmus

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Nov 2016, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> > Can I ask you the converse question: what same-timestamp proposal do
> > you think is best and why ?
> 
> I found Guillem's suggestion the most sensible and as far as I understand the
> matter also the easiest to implement:
> 
> Quoting Guillem Jover (2016-11-09 00:18:25)
> > So the actual problem is that the last timestamp gets reused for the
> > binNMUs, which seems totally bogus to me. This needs to be fixed in
> > whatever is injecting the binNMU entries on the buildds.
> 
> but that proposal did not get any attention so I somehow assumed that there's
> probably a reason not to do so

I don't think so. Given the discussions we had, I agree that it would be
best if the bin-nmu timestamp could be set by wanna-build itself, at the
time the binnmus are requested. That would give a consistent (and real)
timestamp across all arches being rebuilt together.

> and thus I suggested an alternative: choose the
> new timestamp by using the binNMU number and add that many number of seconds. A
> +b17 binNMU would add 17 seconds to the original changelog timestamp. Thus, no
> archive lookups would be required.

This is assuming that the bin-nmu versioning space is linear. It no longer
is because the bin-nmu is no longer defined by the "+bX" added to the
version but by the "binary-only=yes" changelog attribute.

In fact, I expect that we will want bin-nmu within PPA and that we will
have bin-nmu versions like <version>+ppafoo1 in one repo and
<version>+ppabar1 in another repository. (Ubuntu could also benefit
from this when it rebuilds a single source package for multiple release
in a PPA.)

That's something that you could already implement in sbuild BTW. It
currently does not allow to pass such a binNMU version while dpkg
allows it. :-)

Maybe it can be smart and if the parameter to --binNMU-version contains
(or starts with?) non-digits, then it should assume that it's the full
bin-NMU suffix that is passed.

> But maybe to talk about this option: what would speak against changing the
> "nmu" command of wanna-build to also add an option that allows setting a
> timestamp, or even let wanna-build generate that timestamp itself (from the
> time it processes the "nmu" command) and then pass it to sbuild via a
> not-yet-existing --binNMU-timestamp option?
> 
> With that solution we would not have to change anything other than wanna-build
> and sbuild. And I would take care of the latter.

+1 from me on this solution. I don't see anything significant drawback.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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