RE: Building from Subversion instead of tarball

["Wichmann, Mats D" <mats.d.wichmann@xxxxxxxxx>]

 

On Aug 10, 2007, at 10:34 PM, Stanley, Jon wrote:

Thanks Bob. I was going to send a similar mail to the list. The one thing that you didn't mention (but alluded to) that I will explicitly is that one of the paramount principles of packaging in RPM is that of reproducible builds - anyone that you give the SRPM to should be capable of producing an identical binary RPM. When you introdice dynamic sources such as svn, CVS, git, etc., that becomes impossible, and thus defeats the design principles of RPM.

Heh: ""dynamic". Install a compiler with bugs (or even differently evolved behavior),

and you will get dynamically "reproducible" builds every time.

In my experience checking out to a tag on a repository is far less

"dynamic" than setting up a build system.

YMMV, everyone's does. 

 

Yeah, the whole deal is far less reproducible than one might like, but that's life.

Even on "the same" distro/version we have variances due to toolchain updates

being or not being installed; once you go outside that not-quite-walled garden it

gets much wilder, with /etc/rpm configuarion, different choices in configuring and

build of who knows how many explicit and implicit tools and dependencies, etc.

Sometime it's surprising srpms work as well as they do.

 

I guess I'm saying if people don't play foolish games (moving tags around) with

their version-control repo, repo-vs-tarball is probably a pretty small factor in the

reproducibility game. Nonetheless I do personally prefer having a tarball available. 

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