[rb-general] buildinfo content for JVM based build

[Arnout Engelen]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 7:17 PM Hervé BOUTEMY <herve.boutemy at free.fr> wrote:
> > I do think we should include the
> > 'classifier' field, if any, though.
>
> what do you call "classifier"?

The field as described at https://maven.apache.org/pom.html

> > I agree it would be useful to include those: they shouldn't affect the
> > build, but including them in the buildinfo may make it easier to spot
> > when they accidentally do (combined with comparing diffoscope output
> > of course).
>
> notice that we could imagine a verbose buildinfo for investigation, while
> normal buildinfo would not contain too much

I think the buildinfo has 2 purposes: both to be able to recreate the
environment
to be able to reproduce the build, but also to describe aspects of the
environment that may help explain reproducibility problems. For this reason I
think it is useful to always produce the "verbose" buildinfo. I don't see a
strong need for having both a "verbose" and a "succinct" variation of the
buildinfo.

> source is useful, since it's the location where to get sources
> should support many options: artifact coordinates, url of tarball, vcs tag
> coordinates...

Hmm. Perhaps it might also be useful to be able to record both the uri of the
source tarball and the vcs location and tag. Perhaps we should group those
under various "source.xxx" fields?

> > > > java.version=1.8.0_191
> > >
> > > ok, this is the exact version of JVM used to run the build tool, and we
> > > expect that any 1.8.0 JDK will permit same rebuild
> >
> > I'm not sure that is safe to expect, but in any case we should record it ;).
>
> we'll need to share experience on how build result is sensitive to the JDK
> version: I hope patch version is not something important, nor JDK
> distribution, or having effective rebuild will require complex specific setup
> on each case

This would indeed be great, I'm just less optimistic I guess ;).


Kind regards,

Arnout