On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Matthew Burgess wrote:
However, given that this is the Real World, I would be happy enough if
someone could complete an ICA of the alphabetical branch. If it passes those
tests then I'm in favour of merging it to trunk, as it would fix bug 684. If
its impossible to get the alphabetical branch to pass the ICA test, those
tests will have to be run on the current build order and we'll have to adjust
the build order if necessary, then probably just have to accept the fact that
the build order will have to be fairly weakly justified as "trust us, it Just
Works". Hmmm, maybe if someone could write up a "How to Perform ICA tests"
hint we could point to that, so the truly inqusitive can see how we came to
the conclusion that it "Just Works" and therefore don't have to trust us at
all!
Farce [ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/ ] is supposed to do much
the same thing as ICA (i.e. allow you to compare two builds), but with
differences of emphasis (e.g. it expects you to build on different
dates, and even different kernels, by using regexes to isolate date or
time or kernel-version patterns. The big difference is that farce just
gives up and accepts that some files do differ - for base LFS without
BLFS, the affected binaries are pretty much only libstdc++ and
libsupc++.
I seem to recall that in repeated standard LFS i686 builds, these same
binaries can in fact differ, without anybody ever quite knowing why -
this is why Greg's ICA, at least last time I looked, did -three- builds
to compare which bytes always differed.
I think Jeremy did use the initial release of farce in the early days
of the alphabetical branch, despite its bugs.
Anyway, I suspect that the introduction of randomization into the
toolchain might soon make this idea of subsequent builds being identical
into a historical curiosity ;)
Ken
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
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