binutils-dev: included log files introduce reproducibility issues

[Paul Wise]

On Sat, 2020-05-16 at 22:58 +0000, Chris Lamb wrote:

> My gut feeling is that this is the avenue we want to explore. Having a
> separate mechanism to capture this build-specific metadata would be an
> elegant solution and, as you imply, having the logs would have QA
> advantages as well as permit reproducible builds. The system could be
> generic enough for future use-cases that we cannot envisage too.

Agreed that this is the best option. In order to standardise the
naming, structure and organisation of the data in order to make it work
across all Debian derivatives, probably a new conversation needs to be
started between ftp-master and the dpkg maintainer.

> We have taken great pains over the years that no special knowledge,
> tools or tricks are required to compare the artifacts of a Debian
> build with respect to reproducibility.

I'm not involved in repro builds enough so your statement leads me to
wonder how you deal with ignoring the inevitable differences between
the buildinfo files, which would record the inevitable differences in
build environment between different builders. I'm guessing you just
ignore all differences in buildinfo files and would have to add to that
ignoring differences between build logs and other build metadata?

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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