Re: CVS commit: src

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 04 Apr 2009, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Could someone explain to me what the big deal in the first place is?
> Does having an extra boolean really make the world a horrible place?
> So MKREPRO will set MKARZERO, what's the big deal? Why is this worth
> getting upset about? Jeesh.

The big deal is that you went ahead and used MKARZERO in the face
of overwhelming opposition during the discussion in tech-toolchain.
Everybody who commented said that they thought there should be a single
tunable flag for reproducible builds, not a separate user-tunable flag
for each little thing.

You have claimed that the functionality currently controled by MKARZERO
(use zero instead of timestamps in object archives) needs to be
user-tunable, but I haven't seen (or don't remember) an explanation or
example for why it can't be controlled by an internal variable (possibly
named "_MKARZERO"), which would automatically be set from a user-tunable
variable such as MKDETERMINISTIC or MKREPRODUCIBLE.

--apb (Alan Barrett)