Making the build reproducible

[megaglest]

Making the build reproducible

[tomreyn]

I'm interested in MG supporting reproducible builds.

(Debian developer) Pabs suggested that we could use the last source change date instead of the build date. He suggests to use the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable if it is set: https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/

General information:
https://reproducible-builds.org/

Debian specific info:
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Softcoder said this:

• I guess the date removal is ok
• Should we apply the Debian date time changes? We need to check with Titi.

[filux]

Imo SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is basically useless for upstream and for downstream too.
This is maybe useful for some users/players (with soul of troll) to know: "how dead is project".

When time stamp is/was useful?
For developers and mostly during development tests or during resolving some bugs reported by users of "our standalone" packages.

When MG may have problems without time stamp?
e.g. During producing standalone packages, especially not first time with same source (build2, build3, ...) & then resolving bugs reported from users when most of them of course won't know which build they are using (because of not keeping archive/installer which is normal).

[titiger]

If I remember right, the timestamps were added to avoid compatibility trouble with builds from compilers which produce incompatible float results.
On development it helped a bit to see if people did a fresh build or not when testing dev version.

[wrapperband]

Perhaps you could make it the date of the last commit (or such), it would be reproducible, but you could see if a build had been made?

[softcoder]

No need for dates just look at GIT and you have the date of the code change. We really should not care when it was built.

[softcoder]

This was integrated into develop