Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> writes:

> Kei Kebreau <kei@openmailbox.org> writes:
>
>> This was supposed to be a simple version bump for Maxima, but it has
>> come to my attention that Maxima hasn't built reproducibily for quite a
>> while now (since version 5.36.1 according to my tests, possibly
>> further). Is there any particular reason why? I can't seem to pinpoint
>> the cause.
>
> The patch looks good. Are you sure it was reproducible before?
>

That's the thing; I'm not sure! I'll being investigating, though.

> I've found 'diffoscope' to be useful when troubleshooting
> reproducibility problems. E.g. by running it on two cancelled builds, or
> by installing to different output paths with a superficial change to the
> expression. It will show sections that differs which may aid locating
> the offending code.
>

Yes. I see that diffoscope complains about missing 'xxd'. That may be
useful to package (unless we already have it and I'm just oblivious).

> For C family programs, a "hail mary" grep for __DATE__ or __TIME__ can
> be enough. Tobias suggested making those return a fixed value, which I
> think could be worthwhile, at least for the build environment.

Cool. I'll remember this tip.

Patch pushed as 4a652c78d425bfd76c2baba510ecd255b22b4714.