[rb-general] Compiling temporary files with gcc (OCaml compilation)

[Jeremie Dimino]

Hi,

We just started to look at reproducible builds at my company in order
to support cloud builds. We use OCaml extensively and we hit a few
cases where the artefacts produced by the OCaml compiler are not
reproducible, so we are working on fixing these.

We found a problem that is more related to C than OCaml, so I was
hopping that someone on this list already had a similar issue in the
past and could point us in the right direction.

The problem is the following: in some cases, the OCaml compiler
generates a temporary C file that is immediately compiled, linked into
the executable being produced and deleted. The C compilers keeps the
name of the C file in the object file and since this name is random
the build is not reproducible.

It seems that gcc only stores the basename in the object file, so we
could effectively use a temporary directory rather than a temporary
file to solve this issue. However it feels a bit fragile. In
particular other C compilers might store more that just the basename
and even gcc might change in the future.

Has anyone had a similar issue in the past?

Many thanks

-- 
Jeremie