On Thu, 2019-02-14 at 12:25 -0800, John Gilmore wrote: > > I like the idea, however what you are proposing is basically a new > > distro/fork, where you would remove all unreproducible packages, as > > every distro still has some unreproducible bits. > > I suggest going the other way -- produce a distro that is "80% > reproducible" from its source code USB stick and its binary boot USB > stick. You'd already have the global reproducibility structure and > scripts written and working, even before the last packages are > individually reproducible. That global reproducibility tech would be > immediately adoptable by any distro. The output of the reproduction > scripts would be a bootable binary that does boot and run! It would > still have differences from the "release master" bootable binary, but > those differences would be irrelevant to the functioning of the binary, > and would be clearly visible with "diff -r". > > (For one thing, this would cause the distros to actually produce a > "source code USB stick image". Currently most of them don't. They > instead require you to download thousands of separate source packages or > tarballs, and have no scripts readily visible for building those into a > bootable binary image.) > > After accomplishing that, then the focus could go on the 20% (or 10% or > whatever) of packages that aren't yet reproducible. And, people making > small distros could cut out such packages to make a 100% reproducible > distro, as Holger suggested.
FWIW, the Yocto Project supports that today in the form of our "build- appliance" images. They contain all the sources and tools to rebuild the image. We don't go for full reproducibilty "out the box" at a timestamp level but you can configure the build to do that. Even out the box we're way better than 80% though! Cheers, Richard _______________________________________________ rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org mailing list To change your subscription options, visit https://lists.reproducible-builds.org/listinfo/rb-general. To unsubscribe, send an email to rb-general-unsubscr...@lists.reproducible-builds.org.