[rb-general] Paper rough sketch about reproducible builds...

[Justin Cappos]

Okay I added text that I believe handles your suggestions.  I also just
pasted some text from the .buildinfo documentation into the part of the
paper where we will eventually talk about what is and is not a good way to
think about non-determinism.

We'll need to reformat it later, but it seems to make the most sense there
with the paper's current organization.

Justin

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 4:21 PM, Justin Cappos <jcappos at nyu.edu> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at debian.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Justin, could you add me to the repo? My github username is infinity0.
>>
>> As a note for others, on Debian you need to install the "texlive-science"
>> package for "make" to work.
>>
>> I'm not sure about this part:
>>
>> > [..] We propose a more precise goal, specifi-
>> > cally dictating *where* reproducible build bugs should be fixed
>> > rather than just focusing on the goal of making builds re-
>> > producible. [..]
>>
>> This is nice as an ideal goal, but I didn't think we're ready for it yet.
>> I don't see this expanded in the rest of the paper though. Did you have
>> some more concrete ideas towards it?
>>
>
> I don't really have concrete ideas, but the paper really needs to be about
> *something*.  I thought that it was interesting to claim it is bad to
> either change the build environment (i.e., running in a VM / container) or
> doing some post processing steps.  We could argue for changing the source
> code of the build systems, which seems the much harder way to solve the
> problem.
>
>
>> Regarding SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, it should be noted that it's somewhat of a
>> "compromise" solution. The general motivation is described here:
>>
>> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/StandardEnvironmentVariables
>>
>> You should probably also mention buildinfo files, and how they differ
>> from things like Dockerfiles which I briefly touched upon in the other
>> thread, "Regarding Zero Install manifests". The general motivation is
>> described here:
>>
>> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/BuildinfoFiles
>>
>> and in slightly-more precise theoretical terms here:
>>
>> https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/reproducible/buildinfo-spec.
>> git/tree/notes/buildinfo.rst
>>
>>
> These sound like great things to add / correct.  Do you want to take a
> stab at the text?  I could do so also, but it will be a few days...
>
> (If you do edit, feel free to just push your changes to master when you
> are done.)
>
> Thanks,
> Justin
>
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