Bug#781262: [Reproducible-builds] Bug#781262: strip-nondeterminism: remove ar handler now?

[Ximin Luo]

Holger Levsen:
> Hi,
> 
> binutils 2.25-6 (which is long in testing + sid) made the build
> reproducible (#774429). In that course that bug was cloned into #781262,
> which asks for the ar handler of strip-nondeterminism to be removed.
> 
> I'm slightly confused now, but (why) is binutils the only package
> benefitting from said ar handler and can it really go?
> 

It could still be kept, since there are non-GNU tools that handle ar files, such as llvm-ar(1) which may or may not be deterministic.

I'm not sure how many packages use this, and it might be good to remove this anyway so that we have a chance to detect whether llvm-ar(1) truly is or is not deterministic.

Also this handler is itself slightly buggy, see #843811.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=843811

X

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