ar "zero" flag

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry%piermont.com@localhost>]

The last big step to make builds fully reproduceable is to deal with
the fact that .a files contain date, user, group and permissions of
the original .o file that was packed into the .a

Several people, including cgd, have independently suggested that a
flag to ar that said "zeroize the time, uid, etc., on packing" would
be appropriate. This would only be invoked for build.sh builds, and
appropriate logic would be put in to the makefiles or into make to
kludge around the fact that this would break the ability to update .a
files in situ in the build tree. (The kludge would be to remove the .a
file and rebuild it in the face of a .a file with zeroed timestamps,
which is not actually so bad.)

If there are no objections in principle, I'll start working on it.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger                perry%piermont.com@localhost