[Rd] recent changes to r-devel with package date checking?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 26 March 2026 at 16:00, Ivan Krylov via R-devel wrote:
| It turns out that when building a Debian package from an R package,
| /usr/share/R/debian/r-cran.mk sets the timestamp based on the Debian
| changelog entry: https://bugs.debian.org/774031

That is by-now fairly old code related the (very laudable) project of
creating 'reproducible builds' [1].  As one easy way to break a reproducible
build is to encode the current time (as time tends to vary ...) we took an
easy out to stick with 'recent but fixed time' found in the changelog entry.

If these last-minute-literally-before-4.6.0 changes broke that date
processing then that may be a piece we need to pick up.  It should however
only affect production of r-base-core_*.deb and friends.  Which AFAIK is not
done regularly at CRAN. I do rebuild my local R-devel every few days both
locally and a schedule Docker build for drd and friends, I do not auto-build
the .deb files so I have not tried since the R 4.6.3 builds. It may actually
be a good idea to put that task on a schedule at R(-devel) side.  If anybody
in R Core wants to do so I'd be happy to assist off-line.

Dirk

[1] This was once a within-Debian initiative but it has spread much wider,
see https://reproducible-builds.org/ -- and it is also a topic the R
community at large does not seem to have picked up on despite all the
interest in version pinning and freezing and whatnot because 'repro'.

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