[Rd] [3 of n] Revisiting and updating reproducible builds for base R in Debian

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 13 August 2026 at 16:52, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| Alternatively, I could try to patch the treatment of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into
| R's own copy of help2man. From a glance, it only seems to cover a few lines,
| see [3]. My Perl is a little rusty but this seems doable.

I just gave this simpler approach a quick test, manually overrode the date in
debian/changelog by thirteen months to Sep 2027 ie

 -- Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org>  Thu, 13 Sep 2027 17:26:41 -0500

and now R.1.gz in the resulting .deb does indeed show

  .\" DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE!  It was generated by help2man 1.020.
  .TH R "1" "September 2027" "R 4.6.1" FSF

as I now also export the environment variable used for this via debian/rules:

  export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog -l$(CURDIR)/debian/changelog -STimestamp)

Will likely make this a bugzilla simple bugzilla patch.

Dirk

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