[tex-k] Reproducible builds using pdftex

pado at passoire.fr pado at passoire.fr
Mon May 2 23:09:55 CEST 2016


Le 02/05/2016 19:53, Karl Berry a écrit :
> I understood from previous discussions that you don't want to change the
> build processes to require tinkering with the TeX sources or adding
> command line options.

That is the point, you're right. A lot of software packages are
concerned, and fixing all of them is a real hard work.

> So I can imagine supporting a second envvar,
> something like SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH_TEX_PRIMITIVES, which would need to be
> set to enable these changes as well.

This could be OK.
However, I'm wondering:
- What is the advantage of dealing with the two envvars
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH_TEX_PRIMITIVES instead of one?
- And what will be the difference? In our build process, I think we will
set both envvars to the same value for all packages to be built.

> By the way, for your real builds, are you setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to
> the build date, or last mtime for the doc sources, or something?  Not
> actually zero, right?   --thanks, k.

Actually, the last debian/changelog date, which is the last date the
source files were modified. This won't be zero.
That is: when building the software documentation, with the help of the
envvar, pdftex will behave as if this was called right after the last
source change.

Regards,
Alexis Bienvenüe.




More information about the tex-k mailing list