Deterministic builds?

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Mon, 11.10.2010 at 11:35:42 +0200, Erik Cederstrand wrote:
> 
> Den 11/10/2010 kl. 10.47 skrev Kostik Belousov:
> >
> > My personal opinion that the feature is nice to have. Unless the changes to
> > get this working are too large, and, more importantly, unless the maintenance
> > cost of having this in good shape is too high, sure we would better have
> > deterministic build results.
> > 
> > Also, the deterministic builds require somebody who would monitor the
> > feature, either manually, or by setting some bot that automatically
> > checks it. Otherwise, I suspect, it will degrade.
> 
> I might want to adopt the task of monitoring the feature.
> 
> I'm beginning to think that it should at least be optional. Removing e.g. build times, mtimes and path to OBJDIR or SRCDIR might not make everyone happy.

The problem with making it optional is, that we already have enough
flags and knobs. No need in adding more.

Besides, why would people want to know the date of the build? Far more
important is the date and state of the source for the time of build. So
you might want to replace ${BUILDATE} with ${SRCDATE} somehow (time of
last commit?).

Otherwise, please go for it. It would be nice if two people compiling
GENERIC for the same source-base would get identical binaries.

Uli