Hi, On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 03:06:36PM +0100, Chris Lamb wrote: > > apt: please make the output of apt-ftparchive reproducible I have to say, the moo change was entertaining, but while I see why someone might want that [0], I fail to see how that effects reproducibility of anything. Is there some sort of usecase or … how did someone even find it out? apt-ftparchive isn't exactly the most used/friendly/maintained tool… so is this in the end found by codesearch.d.n or what? [0] It helps if you produce patches/diffs for indexes – e.g. pdiffs, but I have yet to meet someone who does it for apt-ftparchive (excluding myself for testing… sometimes I think the only reason it still even runs is that we use it for testing apt itself). The patch is simple enough even after some style changes (we are c++11, so we could use emplace_back e.g.), but it seems to be "incompatible" with the other way of feeding files into the machine: A file listing as the order wouldn't be the given one anymore but whatever apt sorts – which might or might not be what you/the user wants. I guess memory/performance footprint would be negligible as repositories big enough to be visible have machines big enough to hide it, so for me it is really "just" a matter of "what is the point?". After all, sometime down the line someone will come and "ask" why we did that change breaking their carefully engineered setup and it would be handy to have more of an argument than "but … the DPL said so!"… ;) Best regards David Kalnischkies P.S.: apt-sortpkgs can help all those poor folks with unreproducible index files now – it will also make indexes reproducible across tools (assuming they all generate the same fields).
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature