It's not a dumb question, but unfortunately, we live in a dumb^H^H^H^H interesting world. Check out all the links under this heading: https://reproducible-buil

It's not a dumb question, but unfortunately, we live in a dumb^H^H^H^H interesting world. Check out all the links under this heading: https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/#achieve-deterministic-builds https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/#achieve-deterministic-... Many legacy systems capture all sorts of nondeterministic values -- from build date (it might be a desire to be "helpful", but breaks reproducibility) to accidentally depending on the order of inodes on your files system! All of these problems are solvable. It should be dirt simple. It's just a "small matter of programming" :)