> There's no good reason (that I can think of) why this shouldn't have been the case all along Well, it's not like developers consciously thought "How can I ma

> There's no good reason (that I can think of) why this shouldn't have been the case all along Well, it's not like developers consciously thought "How can I make my build process as non-deterministic as possible?", it's just that by the time people started to become aware of the benefits of reproducibility, various forms of non-determinism had already crept in. For example, someone writing an archiving tool would be completely right to think it is a useful feature to store the creation date of the archive in the archive's metadata. The idea that a user might want to force this value to instead be some fixed constant would only occur to someone later when they noticed that their packages were non-reproducible because of this. But you're right; if the goal had been thought of from the start, there's no reason why every build tool wouldn't have supported this.