Re: [patch] sort 'find' output to enable deterministic builds.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Chris,

thanks for the report and patch.

* Chris Demetriou wrote on Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 08:12:31PM CET:
> A project that I work on wants to make sure our builds are
> deterministic, i.e., same input sources -> same exact output binaries.
>  We've solved several problems (e.g., I've added the ar 'D' flag)
> related to this.  The last remaining issue is in libtool.

libtool also uses 'ar' in a number of places and cases, most
prominently, but not limited to, the static linking scenario.
Do you have measures in place to use 'D' there too?

IIRC some (non-GNU) compilers (or the assemblers they call, I don't
recall) also add time stamps to generated objects.  Are they relevant to
you?  I'm not sure whether one can turn stamps off everywhere; have you
looked into normalizing output like in GCC's contrib/compare-debug?

Then, it would be nice to be able to confirm that we produce stable
output in cases where this is desirable; IOW, have testsuite exposure.
Can you describe your setup in a bit more detail?  (You could also
provide a test case, but that will probably require copyright papers
then first.)

Thanks,
Ralf

> 2010-03-15  Chris Demetriou  <address@hidden>
> 
>         Sort output of 'find' to enable deterministic builds.
>         * libltdl/config/ltmain.m4sh (func_extract_archives): Sort
>         output of 'find'.
>         * libltdl/m4/libtool.m4 (_LT_LANG_CXX_CONFIG): Likewise.