Source: snapd Version: 2.61.1-1 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
I'm an occasional volunteer with the Reproducible Builds[1] project, and recently noticed that the snapd package failed automated reproducible build testing[2] on Debian. One cause of non-reproducibility for the package appears to be that the snap.8 manual page (compressed as snap.8.gz) contains a timestamp in the header that becomes timezone-localized, meaning that the Debian binary packages built may vary based on the timezone they're built in. Although one way to fix this could be to request and display a UTC timestamp, there's a comment[3] in the debian/rules file that hints at a better solution: from version 1.4.0-2 of golang-go-flags there is in-built support[4] for the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable, a time-in-seconds since the Unix epoch (interpreted in UTC[5]). That means that it should be possible to generate reproducible manual pages directly by calling the compiled snap binary with the 'help --man' commandline arguments, omitting the sed expression as suggested by the comment. I'll offer a merge request on Salsa to provide that change soon. Regards, James [1] - https://reproducible-builds.org/ [2] - https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/snapd.html [3] - https://sources.debian.org/src/snapd/2.61.1-1/debian/rules/#L281 [4] - https://sources.debian.org/src/golang-go-flags/1.4.0-2/man.go/#L180-L187 [5] - https://pkg.go.dev/time#Unix
