[PATCH 3/9] sb: Do not report current date

[Peter Dufault]

I don't understand what drives this, maybe Sebastian can comment.

I agree with Chris that requiring a documented "grep -v" in an expected output script would assist in reproducibility and process validation.

I also agree with Sebastian that "cmp" returning that files are identical is very reassuring.

> On Dec 8, 2014, at 16:42 , Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org> wrote:
> 
> On 9/12/2014 8:07 am, Gedare Bloom wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org> wrote:
>>> On 8/12/2014 5:48 pm, Sebastian Huber wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> This makes the report reproducible.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I think the report should include a date. I do not see any advantage having
>>> reproducible reports. The report captures the specific instance of the
>>> build.
>>> 
>> Would it make sense to re-build on a different date and want to
>> compare the results to see there is no difference?
> 
> What you build on a different date cannot be the same by definition. 
> The date has changed. In a quality context if you reference the first 
> build that is what you have. You cannot reference an initial build and 
> then say you used a subsequent build because you know it is the same. 
> Where is the dated report to say they are same ? The report is about 
> reporting what you did and what happened.
> 
>> Maybe a flag can be turned on/off for "reproducible" builds.
> 
> I do not like flags being available for things like this. The user then 
> needs to audit the setting and this moves the compliance back up to the 
> user.
> 
>> Or is it the user's
>> responsibility to strip out such non-reproducible bits if they want
>> such a feature?
> 
> I can understand an MD5 hash on the components built and that result 
> being in a report. I have never tried to see if a repeat build of the 
> tools produces an exact binary image.
> 
> I can also understand a user explicitly adding an exemption to an audit 
> process not to check the report. For example it is common to see target 
> binary images have exemptions for date and time strings embedded in them 
> and a manual audit with a hex dump to verify this is the only difference.
> 
> Chris
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Peter
-----------------
Peter Dufault
HD Associates, Inc.      Software and System Engineering