Karl Chen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm doing something that involves building every Debian package, > and I'm finding (usually minor) discrepancies between what I build > from source packages, and the binary packages uploaded by > maintainers. I'm building each package in its own chroot which > contains only the minimum packages (bootstrap + build-essential + > build-dependencies). > > Are such things considered bugs?
That depends on what the discrepancy is. Many generated files (compiled, or typeset documentation) contain some timestamp, or the name of the host on which they were built. Of course this will change between two builds, and is perfectly normal. It is still annoying, however, if you want to check if a particular change in some package breaks the building of other ones - if they don't FTBFS, you have to be very careful to spot the actual differences without getting many false positives. I'm currently undertaking a similar effort; but have not gotten much beyond the manual state. What little automation I have is at http://cvs.debian.org/tetex-common/comparebuild?rev=1.1&cvsroot=tetex&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup What do you do to look at the differences? Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
