3 ms·

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't reproducible builds eventually cut down on the work of package maintainers for Linux distros? Looking from my outsi

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't reproducible builds eventually cut down on the work of package maintainers for Linux distros? Looking from my outside perspective, once you get the packages building reproducibly the work to maintain them is reduced (especially if you can pass the responsibility for packaging to the developer). Couple that with a build-time test suite and the work becomes even less of a burden. I hope this is the case, as I believe that one thing that holds Linux/BSD back from further refinement is the workload involved to maintain packages.

EmanueleAina 11y ago
I don't think so. Reproducible builds means that compiling the binary packages results in byte-by-byte identical copies, even when done on different machines at different times: the packaging sources do not get any simpler (to the contrary, they may get slightly more complex due to additional concerns). The XDG App effort to produce standardized runtimes and isolated applications is probably what you're looking for, but it is completely orthogonal to reproducible builds as runtimes for XDG App can be built in a multitude of ways, eg. with pre-built distribution packages (reproducible or not).