Hi,

gnome-settings-daemon currently fails to reproduce on reproduce.d.n and
is thus blocked from migrating to testing:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnome-settings-daemon

This is due to the tests needing state in /run, likely /run/systemd,
during the build. This state is not easy to reproduce and missing during
the rebuild with debrebuild as documented in [1]. You can test this in
sbuild with:

sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare --dist=unstable --starting-build-commands="rm -r /run/*" gnome-settings-daemon

Is there a reason why the state is needed?

Otherwise I would propose to rework the tests to run without it.

I also consider adding the rm to the sbuild default setup so it would
fail on the Debian buildds as well.

Cheers Jochen


[1] https://release.debian.org/reproducible-builds-host-requirements.html

I didn't look closely at gnome-settings-daemon yet. However, the GNOME
desktop requires systemd and it makes sense to me that
gnome-settings-daemon would have build tests that would ensure that
its sytemd services are working. Therefore, if it's possible for
https://reproduce.debian.net/ to also support /run , that seems to be
to be the better solution than breaking some build tests that require
/run . In this particular case, gnome-settings-daemon also runs those
tests as autopkgtests but not all packages are set up for that yet.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

* Jeremy Bícha <jbicha@debian.org> [2026-10-27 12:21]:

To be clear, systemd is not run during a normal build in sbuild so that
can't be an argument here. Also debrebuild (and thus reproduce.d.n)
support /run just fine, just that the content can be different.
Also note that I am only aware of two packages, gnome-settings-daemon
and libsoup depending on state in /run so I think it is a good time to
discuss it now. If we don't find a good solution in time we can just
hint libsoup into testing (I did that for gnome-settings-daemon
already).

Cheers Jochen

I think we have enough information to fix libsoup, but I don't have
the available time to work on it this week. I think we'll patch
meson.build to give it the specific Apache details it needs. That
might be a Debian-specific patch.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha