[bug #57218] [PATCH] Reproducible builds support is broken and embeds timezone

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #14, bug #57218 (project groff):

With groff's own build now as reproducible as we can get it without support
from other GNU projects, the challenge now is to reproduce the problem
described in the original report.

I performed two consecutive package rebuilds of man-db 2.8.5 on my
Debian-based system and cannot reproduce the problem with groff-generated
PostScript files.  The only differences I observe are in temporary file names
produced by GNU Autoconf tests run by ./configure.  I am attaching this
artifact.

My strategy was simple:


SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=1609123901 debuild -us -uc


Note that there is no difference in the generated PostScript files.


$ grep -r '%%CreationDate' build.*
build.new/manual/man_db.ps:%%CreationDate: Mon Dec 28 02:51:41 2020
build.old/manual/man_db.ps:%%CreationDate: Mon Dec 28 02:51:41 2020


My Debian-based system is running groff 1.22.4.

On the other hand, groff from Git HEAD and 1.22.4 do handle the time zone
differently; this is easily demonstrated by generating a blank PostScript
document.


$ echo | groff | grep '%%CreationDate'
%%CreationDate: Mon Dec 28 03:17:07 2020
$ echo | ./build/test-groff | grep '%%CreationDate'
%%CreationDate: Mon Dec 28 14:17:10 2020
$ echo | SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=1609125163 groff | grep '%%CreationDate'
%%CreationDate: Mon Dec 28 03:12:43 2020
$ echo | SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=1609125163 ./build/test-groff | grep
'%%CreationDate'
%%CreationDate: Mon Dec 28 14:12:43 2020


So that's the next item for research.

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