Introducing: Semantically reproducible builds

[David A. Wheeler]

> On Jun 2, 2023, at 11:10 AM, Ed Warnicke <hagbard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please don't get me wrong, the OSSGadget folks may be doing *really* good work.  My complaint is that the definition of "Semantically Reproducible" is effectively unusable as written above.  Can it be tightened ups to something that at the very least meets the characteristics:
> 
> - Two independent parties given the definition of equivalence and a pair of outputs will always produce the same answer as to whether the outputs are equivalent.

Sadly, different parties can disagree. We sometimes even see that on this mailing list :-).

I think the OSSGadget folks aren't fussed about this, because they're merely using this definition to explain what they're doing.

I think their answer on "are these semantically equivalent" would be, "run the current version of OSSGadget and the answer is what it says". It's a very straightward operational definition once put that way :-).

--- David A. Wheeler