Re: final steps for reproduceable builds.

[christos%zoulas.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

On Mar 9,  1:10pm, perry%piermont.com@localhost ("Perry E. Metzger") wrote:
-- Subject: final steps for reproduceable builds.

| 
| One last step remains to make the build fully reproduceable, which
| is to change the .a file internal timestamps etc. to be deterministic.
| 
| Now that we have cgd's ar(1) changes in -current, we can do the
| rest of the job. The following patch makes the .a builds and
| installs deterministic as desired.
| 
| Note that I've updated the ar flags to current ar usage -- "q" is now
| just a synonym for "r", and "s" does the ranlib in the same pass as
| the ar. The "D" does the deterministic build.
| 
| (Arguably, we should similarly fix sys.mk -- the sys.mk default ARFLAGS
| in sys.mk includes "l", for instance, which does nothing.)
| 
| Comments on this? (For example, does anyone feel we need a switch to
| turn "D" off and restore the ranlib -t on install?) Please let me know
| soon -- I'll be committing in a few days.

I think that there should be a build option to restore the previous behavior.
After all, I am not even sure that gld is happy with the 0 timestamp in
archives, since chris's patch did not disable the timestamp completely before
my last commit. Anyway, this build option should control all things that
make builds deterministic, not just "ar" related.

christos