Reproducibility terminology/definitions

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2023-11-09 at 22:12 +0100, kpcyrd wrote:
>  > - $E$, the set of all possible software environment
> 
> I'm not aware of any project having this in scope. It's crucial for 
> projects to document their build environment (see buildinfo files) and 
> matching it when reproducing the build. If you use a different compiler 
> version, or a different linker version/configuration, you're almost 
> guaranteed to get mismatching binaries. Knowing two different compiler 
> versions produce the same binary is also not inherently useful.

FWIW I think Yocto Project could claim to do this. We don't care about
the build location within reason. We build our own cross compilers and
have a fairly small host dependencies list. We can also build a tarball
of our dependencies, so effectively self bootstrap.

Our infrastructure runs regular reproducibility tests on "random"
distro bases (various versions of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, opensuse) to
ensure we stay reproducible too.

So it definitely is possible!

Cheers,

Richard