[Pkg-libburnia-devel] Reproducible patches for libisoburn and libisofs

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

i wrote:
> > This becomes lengthy. Wiki article size.

Chris Lamb wrote:
> I can't try and convince you -- one last time -- that a single global
> argument, perhaps set via the environment, would be one way to simplify
> this?

I am open to the idea of a bundle-it-all option when all issues and
solutions are explored.
Control via environment is unpopular on my side because it would be
a novelty in the user interface of xorriso.

In general the individual parameter which the user carries from
production run to production run must contain more entropy than a
time stamp of centiseconds granularity.
That's inconvenient to handle manually.

How about this:

  xorriso -as mkisofs ... --reproducible_ids "$HOME/project_42_iso_ids" ...

If file "$HOME/project_42_iso_ids" exists, then the lengthy parameter
is taken from there. It defines a timestamp, a disk GUID, and what else
might turn out to be in need of being reproduced.

If the file does not exist, the user sees a loud warning and the file
is created with the "now" timestamp, a good random GUID, and everything
else.

This option would also trigger options -r, --set_all_file_date, -p.

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There remains the issue of future xorriso versions with bug fixes or
other changes of the ISO result.

We need some quick check whether the new result matches the old one.
Record an MD5 in the ids file ?


Have a nice day :)

Thomas