Re: Building packages twice in a row
On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 11:21:51AM +0200, Guus Sliepen wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 11:12:56AM +0200, Richard Atterer wrote:
>
> > > Wouldn't it be better to unpack a package twice in two different
> > > directories, build and clean in one dir and then compare the obtained
> > > tree with the tree available in the other dir?
> >
> > IMHO, a good test would be to build the package twice and then to compare
> > whether the created .debs are identical between the first and second run.
> > (Of course, file timestamps would have to be ignored when comparing.)
>
> There are lots of reasons why the resulting package can differ each time
> you build it, some of them perfectly valid. For example, this is not
> uncommon in C programs:
>
> printf("foo version %s (built %s %s)\n", VERSION, __DATE__, __TIME__);
>
> Also, running update-po will always change the header of a .po file to
> reflect the last time update-po was run. I don't think we can require
> that building a package twice in a row produces exactly the same .deb
> and/or .diff.gz.
granted there are things like this, but reproducible builds would be
fantastic and well worth the effort.
Regards,
Paddy
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