Subject: bug#73613: texlive-luatex is not reproducible

From: Nicolas Goaziou <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2024 10:40:45 +0200

Hello,

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> writes:

> This was discovered building texlive-luatex twice (--rounds=2 -K);
> diffoscope shows that:
>

[...]

> These are apparently time stamps as well as UUIDs.  Debian [0, 1] and
> NixOS [1] have patched some of them using faketime and substitute [0].
>
> We should follow suite.
>
> [0]  https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/blob/master/examples/hooks/reproducible/2006-reproducible-texlive-binaries-fmt-files.hook.chroot
> [1]  https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/227873

This is difficult to follow, because Debian and NixOS do not seem to
apply the same fixes. For example, the former wraps "faketime" around
"tex -ini tex.ini" call whereas the latter wraps it around
"fmtutil-sys --all" call.

By the way, how do you call "faketime" from (guix build-system texlive)?
It is not possible to use (gnu packages check) module from there, isn't
it?

Note that Guix never runs "mtxrun --generate", so I don't think UUIDs
are a problem in our case.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou