Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Make the compiler output deterministic

[Peter Bex]

On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 05:10:36PM +0200, Kooda wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> It’s been a while since I proposed this change! Here is a set of
> patches that does this in a more clean way than the last patch (which
> fiddled with the random seed in the compiler, ugh…)
> 
> The four patches are independent and address different points of the
> code that make the build process unstable. I hope everything is clear,
> feel free to ask me if anything isn’t.

Very nice!  I've pushed these patches, except for the third one which
changed LIBRARIAN_OPTIONS ?= cru to LIBRARIAN_OPTIONS ?= crD.

The reason being that this D (deterministic mode) switch is specific to
GNU ar, and newer versions at that.  OpenBSD has GNU ar, but a version
that's so old (2006!) it doesn't include the option.  Solaris doesn't
seem to have the option either, and it isn't standardised by POSIX.

I think projects that think deterministic builds are important will
probably have configured their ar at build time with the configure
flag --enable-deterministic-archives.  If not, they can always override
LIBRARIAN_OPTIONS when compiling CHICKEN, so I think this is all good
enough.

If necessary, we could add a few words to this effect to the README
file.  For now, I think the README is large enough already as it is,
and people who are used to this kind of stuff will probably know enough
to find the option or compile ar with the flag.

Cheers,
Peter

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