Rationale:
- This package is required by newer debhelper versions. In Debian it has been developed separately from the debhelper source for historical reasons, but debhelper depends on it now, and all Debian builds have run wit it since https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debhelper/debhelper.git/commit/?id=2a1dc83a0 (August 2015).
- While we don't currently invest development into reproducible builds in Ubuntu, this is a highly valuable goal, and we certainly want to make use of Debian's work there.
Security: This package is still fairly young, but the security surface is rather small. It only runs during package build and does things like removing timestamps and sorting files, it has zero installed/runtime effect on binaries and only these kind of "predictable metadata" effect on other files shipped by packages. Anything dh_strip_nondeterminism can potentially be exploited to do is much easier done with direct commands in debian/rules.
QA:
- Not necessary to configure; dh calls this automatically when available
- No debconf questions
- No major bugs in Debian/no bugs in Ubuntu; package is actively being developed and used in Debian
- Package has tests which run during build.
- All dependencies are already in main
- We don't expect Ubuntu specific maintenance here, we just sync from Debian and thus get gradual improvements on package build reproducibility.
- I subscribed the Ubuntu Foundations Team to bug reports, who will care about reviewing bugs.
Looks great! If this causes too many FTBFS in the archive we can adjust the integration level. But the package itself looks good.