Ludovic Courtès
Virtual build machines to the rescue of software archaeologists: Not just archaeologists actually: it’s something you need to rebuild packages that include “time traps” (fail to build after some time). It’s relatively rare, but when you need them, you’d rather have a simple way to work around the problem. 3 comments
Ludovic Courtès
@vagrantc Yup, and reprotest has shown that this can indeed be very useful! My ideal, in the spirit of Nix/Guix, would be to have a way to keep those details under control. But VMs are more expensive than mere processes in separate namespaces: we wouldn’t want to run every build in a VM. Plus that creates a bootstrap problem: how do you provision the VM? For now, this tool should at least let us rebuild old packages.  |
Gregory's Server
@civodul
Also, running builds in the future can help detect time bombs before they happen so that you can fix it now, before it is a more bothersome problem!
I am interested in using this to introduce problems...
changing the clock, kernel, CPU, hostname and username is really useful for #ReproducibleBuilds troubleshooting, as all of these things have been known to affect build results in the wild.
Looking forward to playing with this, thanks!