Re: [erlang-questions] Reproducible Erlang builds - still some time stamps (non-deterministic build)

Re: [erlang-questions] Reproducible Erlang builds - still some time stamps (non-deterministic build)

[Pjotr Prins]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 624 bytes --]

Dear all,

Below a diffoscope of two builds on GNU Guix of Erlang 19.0-rc2. It
turns out some files are still different between builds. Some .script
files contain time stamps like:

    %% script generated at {2016,6,11}{19,5,37} 

The snmp, otp_mips, os_mon, gs modules also injects time stamps.

And some beam files in cosNotification and cosProperty introduce
differences.

See attached report (made by leo).

I think none of these modules is critical and we can safely purge
these modules from GNU Guix so it becomes deterministic (we only
accept deterministic software packages) for the time being. Do you
agree?

Pj.


[-- Attachment #2: report.html --]
[-- Type: text/html, Size: 400917 bytes --]

Reproducible Erlang builds - accepted in GNU Guix!

[Pjotr Prins]

Good news. Erlang has been accepted as a GNU Guix package:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/

The package definition is here:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/erlang.scm
 
you can see, thanks to Leo's work, we still patch out the time stamp
from a few files, but now we have a byte-reproducible build!

This means that Guix is probably the easiest way to install Erlang
reproducibly with *all* its dependencies on *any* Linux distribution.

Note we included the debugger too and it works :)

I have been testing this setup developing against Elixir. I'll add an
Elixir package too, one of these days. We use it in a production
environment.

Pj.