[Pkg-octave-devel] [Reproducible-builds] Trying to fix random_buildpath_by_octave

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Mike Miller <mtmiller at debian.org> [2016-02-12 15:43]:

> On Sun, Feb 07, 2016 at 13:46:55 +0100, Oliver Heimlich wrote:
>> How about using a workaround and exchange the tempname function with
>> something that returns [tempdir]/oct-[counter]?
>
> Just discussed this with oheim on #octave.
>
> We think we may have found the causes of this non-reproducibility 
> problem.
>
> Way back in Octave 3.4, the exist() function was fixed so that 
> directories were correctly treated as files. This broke the prior 
> behavior of "pkg install ." to allow an unpacked directory to be built 
> in place and installed.
>
> This was fixed in Debian and Fedora packaging two different ways. The 
> Debian patch enable_dirs_in_pkg restores building from the Debian source 
> package, but it forces the files to be copied into a temporary path and 
> built there. This is the source of the random build path.
>
> The Fedora patch instead restores what I think was the original 
> behavior, allowing an unpacked source package to be compiled in place. 
> This is also reported upstream as bug #32839, and I think this is the 
> approach that should be taken.
>
> I have not tested, but perhaps dropping enable_dirs_in_pkg and adopting 
> the Fedora patch [1] may resolve this problem.
>
> [1]: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/octave.git/tree/octave-pkgbuilddir.patch

Thanks for this proposal.  I tested it and can confirm that replacing our 
current patch by the Fedora patch, indeed, fixes the problem of random 
paths in the .oct files built through "pkg install .".

I pushed the changes to the Git repository [commit 088e634].  Please, 
test it.

Rafael