[rb-general] How to modify mount-time and write when you write in a file system

[intrigeri]

Hi,

Ximin Luo:
> You are extracting a squashfs container to a ext4 FS, adding extra files to it, and then expecting the ext4 block device to be reproducible when you do this twice?

> Am I correct? If not, can you explain in more detail what you are actually doing?

> Assuming I am correct, I don't think anyone has tried getting ext4 to work
> reproducibly after doing normal filesystem operations on it. It would be nice but
> nobody has looked into this unfortunately. I believe that squashfs "almost" works
> reproducibly, see https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/12032 but they have a few
> remaining issues, perhaps the TAILS folks can elaborate here.

(In passing: s/TAILS/Tails/ :)

Among the remaining reproducibility issues we have for the Tails ISO
image, only one *might* have something to do with mksquashfs:

  https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/12739

But it's quite unlikely: chances are that this difference in the
SquashFS metadata is a mere consequence of differences in the data we
feed mksquashfs with. We'll come back to this problem once we have
fixed these other reproducibility issues.

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri