Research on Reproducible Builds

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2020-03-05, Chris Lamb wrote:
> David A. Wheeler wrote:
>> The paper's description of date handling sounds odd, where "dates" are 
>> really counts of system calls. If the "starting date" is arbitrary (like Jan 
>> 1, 1970) that would look odd. But if the "starting date" were forcibly set to a 
>> human-reasonable value (like the date-time of the last commit, or of the latest source 
>> file), then it might be easier to accept the results.
>
> This was curious to me too — to wit, the paper describes that the Debian
> «wheezy» distribution was being built so it was interesting to me that
> the first timestamp in the debian/changelog was not chosen, á la
> SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

If I recall correctly, wheezy was chosen precisely because it had *less*
reproducibility fixes ... so that they could more easily tell how much
dettrace solved...

live well,
  vagrant