[rb-general] Report from the Summit

[Richard Purdie]

On Tue, 2016-12-20 at 13:22 +0100, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote:
> Some of them are easy to normalize using build tools that setup a
> clean
> build environment and some aren't.
> (e.g. I tried libfaketime but it did not help much)

Its a bit of a further tangent but we (as in the Yocto Project) have a
separate project called pseudo, which is basically an alternative to
fakeroot.

http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/pseudo/

It allows us to emulate root permissions for various things such as
file ownership, file modes, xattrs, chroot, run a userspace nfs server
and other neat tricks. This lets us abstract away from issues with the
underlying filesystem from a reproducibility perspective.

When pseudo was created there were various problems with fakeroot and
this made with a different architecure to avoid them, you can stop and
restart sessions quite safely with this. I don't know if any of the
issues with fakeroot were resolved, pseudo has worked well for us so
we've stuck with it.

Cheers,

Richard