[Reproducible-builds] building reproducible files with mono

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Hi Debian Mono packagers!

I'm writing from the Debian Reproducible Builds project [0], and as a
co-maintainer of gmime [1], which builds libgmime2.6-cil{,-dev}.

I'd like gmime to be able to create byte-for-byte identical .dlls after
two separate builds, but currently they end up differing slightly [2].

One issue is the PE executable contains a build timestamp [3], and we
have a proposed way to get into such a created file and tweak the value
of the timestamp [4], but (a) this doesn't cover all the differences,
and (b) it would be nicer if there was a way to intentionally have the
toolchain create reproducible binaries in the first place.

I confess i don't understand the mono toolchain particularly well -- do
you have any suggestions on approaches that might work well here?

Please keep reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org in the cc of any
response, so that members of both teams can collaborate on this.

Thanks,

	--dkg

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
[1] https://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gmime.html
[2] https://jenkins.debian.net/userContent/rb-pkg/gmime.html
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/TimestampInPEBinaries
[4]
https://github.com/FauxFaux/strip-nondeterminism/blob/master/lib/File/StripNondeterminism/handlers/pe.pm

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