[Rd] Revisiting and updating reproducible builds for base R in Debian

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 4 August 2026 at 19:01, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| On 4 August 2026 at 16:23, Gabriel Becker wrote:
| | grabbing the timestamp environment field but then the DESCRIPTION is being
| | overwritten by the bolded command at the end which doesn't respect the
| | timestamp.
[...]
| This is good, and much appreciated!  Will play with it, likely tomorrow.

Easiest most minimal fix seems to be to replace the call you bolded with the
equivalent (?) call to the snippet from the helper file:

	@$(MAKE) mkdesc

Then (in R-devel) all is good and normalised:

edd using paul:~/svn/r-devel$ grep '^Built' /usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/*/DESCRIPTION |grep 2026-08-0
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/base/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; ; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/compiler/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; ; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/datasets/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; ; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/graphics/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/grDevices/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/grid/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/methods/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/parallel/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/splines/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/stats4/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; ; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/stats/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/tcltk/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/tools/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R/library/utils/DESCRIPTION:Built: R 4.7.0; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu; 2026-08-02 16:37:21 UTC; unix
edd using paul:~/svn/r-devel$

Dirk

-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org