[master]: Redo the handling of changed ar behaviourdebian/4.1-2

Also added a NEWS file, since there is a change in the behaviour of
ar, and thus make.

Signed-off-by: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>

2 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/debian/NEWS.Debian b/debian/NEWS.Debian
index b94145b1..08f01cca 100644
--- a/debian/NEWS.Debian
+++ b/debian/NEWS.Debian
@@ -1,3 +1,29 @@
+make-dfsg (4.1-2) unstable; urgency=low
+
+  WARNING: Backward-incompatibility!
+
+  The ar program in the binutils package in Debian is now configured
+  with --enable-deterministic-archives. This change makes the archives
+  reproducible, by setting the UID, GID, and timestamp to 0. However,
+  when dealing with archives created with the libxx(*.o) style rules,
+  make needs the timestamp of the file in order to decide to update it
+  or not. With the current deterministic behavior of ar, the time stamp
+  is always 0. This has consequences, since make will fall back to always
+  adding each member to the archive, whether or not it is required. This
+  is a change in behaviour, and, for instance, it makes make fail to
+  build, failing 7 out of 10 archive tests.
+  .
+  Since binutils will create archive with time stamps set to 0 when
+  running in "deterministic" mode, make will always try to update such
+  members. When this is detected, make will emit a warning.
+  .
+  There is some online discussion:
+  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=798804
+  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=798913
+  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1195883
+
+ -- Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>  Mon, 18 Jan 2016 16:09:19 -0800
+
 make-dfsg (4.0-1) experimental; urgency=low
 
   WARNING: Backward-incompatibility!
diff --git a/debian/changelog b/debian/changelog
index 05a39bdf..44f3fc7e 100644
--- a/debian/changelog
+++ b/debian/changelog
@@ -1,3 +1,16 @@
+make-dfsg (4.1-2) unstable; urgency=low
+
+  * Update the handling of the changed behaviour of ar. The fix in the
+    previous version has been rolled back. The new strategy is to narrowly
+    change running the test suite to pass in the U modifier to ar, and
+    change make to detect and warn the user of they are using the archive
+    rule like libxx(*.o) to generate archives, and the archives do not
+    contain time stamps. The warning advises the user to explicitly pass
+    in the modifier U in the environment variable ARFLAGS, which is
+    essentially what we did for the test suite.
+
+ -- Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>  Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:57:45 -0800
+
 make-dfsg (4.1-1) unstable; urgency=low
 
   * New upstream release