Dear Maintainer,

While working on the "reproducible builds" effort [1], we have noticed
that some packages (like latex2html) use one of the netpbm utilities in
their process, leading to unreproducible output (due to the use of the
random generator, seeded from a time() call).

To solve this kind of issues, it would be nice to make netpbm support
the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [2].

See the attached patch for a proposed solution.

Regards,
Alexis Bienvenüe.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
[2] https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/

Hi,

thanks a lot for your effort to enable reproducible builds, which I
really like to support.  Unfortunately your patch remained unapplied
by the Maintainers of this package.  I recently moved the package to
the Debian Phototools team and try to have a look *from time to time*
(=I do not feel like a responsible Uploader due to time constraints
but I'd volunteer to do team uploads for reasons I consider important
and reproducible builds belong to this.)

I tried to apply your patch to the latest upstream version which I just
uploaded.  Unfortunately every single chunk of the patch is rejected.  I
had a quick look and realised that the code changed in a way that it is
really hard to adapt the patches and I gave up.  I'd happily upload a
package quickly if you could come up with a new patch.  Feel free to
ping me about this.

Kind regards
   Andreas.

Latex2html uses "pnmquant -norandom" (since v2021.2),
so this bug no longer affects latex2html.

Control: affects 827115 - latex2html

Thanks for the heads-up.

cu Andreas