Yosys docs reproducibility (Was: Yosys in Debian)

[Daniel Gröber]

Hi Emil, Hi Krystine,

On Tue, Jul 09, 2024 at 11:37:02AM +0200, Emil Jiří Tywoniak wrote:
> Thank you for the extensive information. I have looked at the ordering of
> pass short_help strings and I find them to be ordered by iterating over
> std::map<std::string, Pass*> pass_register; which clearly is defined
> regardless of locale since std::map uses std::less for comparison which
> uses operator< which for std::string is given as std::lexicographical_compare
> which is described
> <https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/lexicographical_compare> as
> "If one range is a prefix of another, the shorter range is
> lexicographically *less* than the other."

Right I had found those docs too, but lexicographical ordering may still
depend on locale.

> Therefore synth_intel ought to always come before synth_intel_alm
> regardless of stability or locale. Would you mind sharing information about
> which locale was used and the commit this was tested at?

I don't have that noted down unfortunately. These notes are from the
trenches :]

Reprotest just picks "random" locales AFAIK, but perhaps biased towards
ones with interesting behaviours.

On Tue, Jul 09, 2024 at 09:54:12PM +1200, Krystine Sherwin wrote:
> If this is about the order of .rst files read by Sphinx during a docs build
> (and in turn the order they are output and/or listed in the contents), the
> command reference pages are detected by sphinx via globbing of
> /docs/source/cmd/*. 

Aah, that would make sense. I forgot about disorderfs. Reprotest
intentionally introduces readdir() reordering (if enabled/installed). That
was IIRC why I could initially not reproduce this locally and only saw it
in CI.

> If that is giving different orders depending on locale
> I imagine that would be a problem with Sphinx and not something we can
> solve without providing a complete list of source files, which isn’t really
> feasible.

Where is this glob? Who expands it?

Surely there should be a way sort the list after expansion.

--Daniel