Re: Deterministic Library Calls when Building

[Thompson, David]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 6:04 AM, Karl Semich <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently learned about guix and I haven't found any information on
> approaching deterministic builds by changing library and kernel
> functions to have deterministic behavior.  Has anybody done this?
>
> For example, I would imagine if I needed timestamps to no longer be a
> factor, I might change how the current time is reported to the build
> environment, such that it is always precisely equal to the time of
> last modification of the source package.  Similarly /dev/*random
> should return deterministic numbers seeded by perhaps the hash of the
> source package and all dependencies.
>
> Has there been a discussion of this somewhere?

I'm not sure if there has been an on-the-record discussion of this
anywhere, but I have thought about similar things re: random numbers.
Maybe this thread is the time to discuss? :)

- Dave