Re: Bug#1102295: d/control must not change during build

Jochen Sprickerhof <[email protected]> Sat, 25 Oct 2025 10:04:56 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.dpkg.general
Organization	The Debian Project
Message-ID	<aPyEqKqq6LE11enk@fenchel>

* Simon McVittie <[email protected]> [2025-04-08 10:33]:
>On Mon, 07 Apr 2025 at 14:08:23 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
>>it appears that currently there is no requirement for d/control to 
>>stay the same before and after a build. However, many things require 
>>this to be the case, and ftp-master also requires this in their 
>>reject-faq [1].
>>
>>[1] https://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html "debian/control breakage #2"
>
>I am not a ftp team member, but I believe that point is specifically 
>forbidding the set of built packages from changing during the build, 
>and not the rest of debian/control:
>
>- regenerating debian/control during clean to rewrite "less important"   
>fields like Uploaders or Description: reluctantly allowed

I think we should not allow this as it a number of tools run clean in 
different situations and environments and that could result in a changed 
d/control without the user noticing. Instead I would propose that clean 
can generate a new d/control and fail if the content is different from 
the current one. A number of packages do this already and I think it is 
nice that there is an explicit error instead of an implicit change.

Over all I would appreciate a policy change as discussed here as I 
invested already quiet some time to find the causes of random non 
reproducible packages due to changes in d/control during the build. The 
last one being #1118589.

Thanks for the work!

Jochen

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