On Sun, Nov 17, 2024 at 08:32:04PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > I agree in theory but don't know how practical it is to achieve. > > It seems that it wouldn't matter as much if we required GNU tar to produce > the file, as this version of tar wouldn't be required by people building > the software. We could provide extra flags as described at this page: > > https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/archives/
Indeed. Maybe a possibility, but to be done later on, could be to have two modes, a 'reproducible' mode with the flags as described at the above page, and a 'compatible' mode as it is now which ensures that any tar succeeds for all the known platforms. Possibly turned on/off by detecting that GNU tar is used. > However, I do not want to start trying to fix all the different ways > the distribution may be non-reproducible at this stage, if it turns out > there are a lot of other issues to fix. Agreed, it can be left for later. -- Pat
