Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add Nmap.

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> [large snip]
>
> I hope this clarifies things.

Yes!  Thanks for your patience.  It now dawns on me that our primary aim
isn't byte-equal build process outputs (in terms of file contents); it's
"immutable run-time behavior" of a package.  That is to say, if
/gnu/store/...-foo/bin/foo works fine today, it should work fine any
day; it's unacceptable to let it load a different .so than its
designated one, unless we define some very strict criteria for the .so
and prove that a replacement satisfies them...  Similarly for some
Python module the program uses.  I was chasing a "reproducible builds"
red herring.

That being said, I still think it's wasteful that C code gets recompiled
when there's an update to a dynamic component.

A rough idea for the future: save some intermediate build output (say
from the 'build' phase), then when there's an update to a run-time
component such as a DSO or dynlang module, make a new package that
merely receives some tweaks to the saved intermediate output, such as
fixing RUNPATH, re-patching shebang lines, etc.  Users will still need
to download these new packages; that in turn could be improved via
binary diffs one day.

> So, where were we with this nmap patch?  :-)

Heh, indeed.

I thought I'd wait for feedback from the Nmap ML but I guess that's not
necessary.  I'll continue working on it tomorrow.

Taylan