Re: Make documentation builds reproducible

On Wed Aug 23, 2023 at 2:24 PM CDT, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Somewhere at PGCon, I forgot exactly where, maybe in the same meeting
> where we talked about getting rid of distprep, we talked about that the
> documentation builds are not reproducible (in the sense of
> https://reproducible-builds.org/) This is easily fixable, the fix is
> available upstream
> (https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/issues/54) but not
> released. We can backpatch that into our customization layer. The
> attached patch shows it.

I am a tiny bit confused here. The commit that solved the issue was
merged into the master branch in 2018. GitHub lists the lastest release
as being in 2020. A quick git command shows this has been in releases
since December of 2018.

$ git --no-pager tag --contains 0763160
ndw-test-001
snapshot-2018-12-07-01
snapshot-ndw-test/2019-10-04
snapshot/2018-09-28-172
snapshot/2018-09-28-173
snapshot/2018-09-28-174
snapshot/2018-09-28-175
snapshot/2018-09-29-176
snapshot/2018-09-29-177
snapshot/2018-09-30-178
snapshot/2018-09-30-179
snapshot/2018-10-01-180
snapshot/2018-10-02-183
snapshot/2018-10-02-184
snapshot/2018-10-16-185
snapshot/2018-10-16-186
snapshot/2018-10-21-188
snapshot/2018-11-01-191
snapshot/2019-10-05-bobs
snapshot/2020-05-28-pdesjardins
snapshot/2020-06-03

Is there anything I am missing? Is Postgres relying on releases older
than snapshot-2018-12-07-01? If so, is it possible to up the minimum
version?

> I had actually often wanted this during development. When making
> documentation tooling changes, it's useful to be able to compare the
> output before and after, and this will eliminate false positives in that.
>
> This patch addresses both the HTML and the FO output. The man output is
> already reproducible AFAICT. Note that the final PDF output is
> currently not reproducible; that's a different issue that needs to be
> fixed in FOP. (See
> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/TimestampsInPDFGeneratedByApacheFOP.)

I think reproducibility is very important. Thanks for taking this on!

--
Tristan Partin
Neon (https://neon.tech)