[PureOS] Using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH env var in PureOS builds

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

On Fri, 2019-07-12 at 13:11 -0300, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Hi Jeremiah,
>  
> > I impatiently added the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to the version of make-
> > live
> > that we use to build PureOS images. It seems to have made a
> > difference
> […]
> > The leads me to believe that I need to ensure that
> > SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is
> > being seen when the squashfs file system is written
> 
> This is somewhat of non-sequitur to my ears — if it made any
> difference it surely is being seen in the "last mile" and thus
> relevant build context? (Regardless, sprinkling in a few debug
> statements makes sense just as a reassurance so I would go ahead and
> do this anyway.)
> 
> > After that I think the next step, or even a step to take anyway, is
> > to
> > run strip-nondeterminism over the resulting ISOs[1.]
> 
> Alas, we would part ways here in that I would be against running
> this.
> I doubt that would have the desired effect and nor would be a clean
> and sustainable route going forward.
> 
> To elaborate, strip-nondeterminism is not a clairvoyant magic wand
> for
> cleaning stuff up, it's more of a surgical strike against quite-
> specific problems that are currently out-of-scope for me to fix in
> upstream toolchains right now. That is to say, in an ideal world the
> tool would be deprecated and removed. Give us time. :)

Okay, I'll avoid it. :-) I did a naive run and it produced no
discernable effects so the wand was out of magic.

> Just glancing at the diff in order that you can get another "go" at
> this before the start of the weekend: my gut feel is that we are
> building with versions of tools that do not have various patches
> designed to make various outputs reproducible. (Just as use one
> relevant example, I have made patches to mksquashfs and casper that
> may not be present in the versions you are using.)

I'm on stretch on the build machine, I'll upgrade to buster. :-)

> This may (or may not…) be in addition to the aforementioned
> SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH not being present in the right contexts....

We shall find out.

Cheers,

Jeremiah
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