the opam debian package is not reproducible

[hannesm]

someone brought to my attention that opam2, now in buster, is not entirely reproducible. the very kind people from the reproducible builds project host a website containing their results: https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/buster/amd64/diffoscope-results/opam.html

what do we see there? the (optional) opam-docs package, which installs the doc/dev-manual (still at version 1.1.2 AFAICT), does contain - as common in latex - a timestamp of when the tex was translated to a pdf.

I think this can easily be avoided by using some waternarking (%%VERSION%%) in the tex - or unset \date{}. The timestamp of when latex was run is not very informative, it is much more interesting which opam release this document is targeting, or the git head!?

I haven't looked inside the dev-manual at all, but if it is specific for opam1, maybe it could be deleted or needs to be updated.

[h01ger]

thanks Hannes for reporting this.

If you want a timestamp in the manual, I suggest to use the last modification of the source code (and not the build time...), see https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/

[rjbou]

PR #3583 that remove dev manual merged.
Thanks for reporting!