svn commit: r310425 - in head/sys/dev/mlx4: mlx4_core mlx4_ib

[Ed Maste]

On 22 December 2016 at 15:09, Pedro Giffuni <pfg at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 22/12/2016 13:26, Ed Maste wrote:
>>
>> Author: emaste
>> Date: Thu Dec 22 18:26:21 2016
>> New Revision: 310425
>> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/310425
>>
>> Log:
>>    mlx: avoid use of __DATE__ to make build reproducible
>>       Reviewed by:      hselasky
>>    Differential Revision:       https://reviews.freebsd.org/D8886
>
> Hmm ...
> Sadly opengrok[*] reveals many uses of __DATE__.

Many of these are not an issue for a reproducible base system though:
they're in comments, in source under tools/ or contrib code that's not
built, or are the implementation of __DATE__ support in some compiler
or text processor.

I believe that on amd64 it was only this now-removed instance in
mlx(4) and the one in iasl (see https://reviews.freebsd.org/D8856)
that affected base system reproducibility.

> I am wondering if there is some way to have it replaced with the SVN Date
> keyword.

I don't like the idea of deriving it from an SVN keyword, since it
then doesn't work for FreeBSD developers or downstream projects using
git or other version control tools.

The kernel version uniquely identifies the source from which it was
built, and in my opinion it's preferable to just remove this sort of
metadata. Here I went with just pinning it to the last date the src
was updated as this vendor code and produces a user-facing string, but
perhaps Mellanox can be convinced to just remove the DRV_RELDATE.
Posted in https://reviews.freebsd.org/D8888.