[rb-general] Flathub, initial proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On tis, 2016-08-30 at 14:38 -0400, James wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 10:20 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com
> > wrote:
> > 
> > The Build/Distribution Problem
> > ==============================
> May I add one proposal to consider as part of the design phase?
> Please
> try and take into account a way to make these builds reproducible.
> Eg,
> as in: http://reproducible-builds.org/
> 
> The reproducible builds team has done a great job to get distro
> packaging into shape, and this future is in sight, but it would be
> sad
> if our applications aren't reproducible, even if they are sandboxed.
> 
> I'm happy to put people in touch with some of the developers if need
> be. They are very approachable.

I'm very interested in reproducible builds, and I love what the debian
reproducible build people are doing.  Flatpak has several features that
make reproducible builds easier. For instance, we build with a well
defined SDK, with no access to anything else, plus the builds are
always in the same directory (under /run/build/) to make debug info the
same, and we have some .pyc mtime rewrite hackery.

However, getting fully reproducible builds is all about tweaking the
individual build of each app. There is no way we can make every build
automatically reproducible, or require that they will be.

Basically, our tooling helps make reproducible builds easier, and we
can add features making it even easier, but we can't guarantee/require
it for every app.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
He's an underprivileged vegetarian cowboy looking for a cure to the 
poison coursing through his veins. She's a pregnant tempestuous queen of 
the dead from a secret island of warrior women. They fight crime!