Re: Bug#647522: non-deterministic compression results with gzip -n9

[Cyril Brulebois]

Zack Weinberg <address@hidden> (07/02/2012):
> I've seen inexplicable nondeterminism like this before, and quite
> often it's turned out to be controlled by the total size of the
> command line argument area (that is, argv + environ + ELF auxv).

FWIW, a quick look on kfreebsd-amd64 with ppl's CREDITS file led me to:
  gzip -9nf CREDITS → 6343 bytes

running dh_installdocs && dh_compress with DH_VERBOSE, I noticed the
following command line:
  gzip -9nf README CREDITS
and the result → 6344 bytes.

Playing on amd64:
address@hidden:/tmp/ppl-0.11.2$ cp ../ppl-pristine/{CREDITS,README} .
address@hidden:/tmp/ppl-0.11.2$ gzip -9nf CREDITS README
address@hidden:/tmp/ppl-0.11.2$ ls -l *gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 cbrulebois cbrulebois 6343 Feb  8 12:34 CREDITS.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 cbrulebois cbrulebois 8745 Feb  8 12:34 README.gz
address@hidden:/tmp/ppl-0.11.2$ cp ../ppl-pristine/{CREDITS,README} .
address@hidden:/tmp/ppl-0.11.2$ gzip -9nf README CREDITS
address@hidden:/tmp/ppl-0.11.2$ ls -l *gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 cbrulebois cbrulebois 6344 Feb  8 12:34 CREDITS.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 cbrulebois cbrulebois 8745 Feb  8 12:34 README.gz

It looks to me like it shouldn't be hard to figure out what happens here
given the few tests I performed with the above command lines. On a few
iterations, reproducibility (with a given input command line) doesn't
seem to be an issue.

Mraw,
KiBi.

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