[php-maint] Upstream with 1/1/1970 as file dates, and git-buildpackage driving me crazy

[Thomas Goirand]

Hi,

I've just fixed a weird issue that I thought we didn't have in the
Debian package of php-compat, with upstream PEAR package having stupid
dates in the orig.tar.gz. I thought it was worth mentioning in both
lists, so that others will understand faster than I what happens.

You can see my last entry if you want to see the long log:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/836935

If you want it shorter: if you package with Git, upstream file dates
might be changed by git-buildpackage using the dates of your "upstream"
branch if you just extract upstream tarball. But if you rebuild the
resulting package using the orig.tar.gz file, then dates are the one of
upstream, as installed by "pear install". This isn't an issue, unless
upstream, like for php-compat, has many files with date 1/1/1970. Using
php-pkg-tools fixes the issue.

I guess we see other occurrences with other types of packages in the
archive. I'd say that this is a *MAJOR FLOW* of git-buildpackage which
should at least warn the user, and ideally use the orig.tar.gz dates to
build, if there's no difference in the file content in the upstream
branch. Shouldn't lintian have a look to upstream tarball, and be
warning us too, if using -E --pedantic?

I'm currently switching all my PEAR packages to pkg-php-tools, and I
would advise everyone to do that, since wrong dates happens often with
upstream PEAR tarballs.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)