Re: bash: Please make bash build reproducibly

[Ximin Luo]

CC'ing everyone that was on the previous conversation; Debian's BTS doesn't do 
this automatically :(

We've made some progress on the Debian side; there's a few more stumbling 
blocks though:

On Sat, 28 May 2016 13:38:35 +0200 Reiner Herrmann <reiner@reiner-h.de> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> it looks like most of the documentation related issues are now solved
> by fixed toolchain packages.  But it still uses the embedded and
> outdated copy of man2html, which doesn't support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH yet.
> The attached patch uses the system man2html instead of the embedded one.
> 
> After that, the only remaining issue is that the included header file
> /usr/include/bash/config.h varies depending on the kernel version used
> during build [1] (with kernel <4, PGRP_PIPE is defined).
> 

For this particular example, we can just patch this out, i.e. remove it from 
the installed config.h. Debian already forces PGRP_PIPE 1 in config-bot.h, 
which config.h includes at the end.

In general however, installing config.h is a code smell and an anti-pattern - 
it takes test results from the *build machine*, and then forces my machine to 
assume those. The presence of this anti-pattern potentially can make future 
versions unreproducible again, and we'll have to think of new ways to fix 
those, since this PGRP_PIPE forcing is just a lucky coincidence.

The ideal solution from a software architecture viewpoint, would be (1) make 
the headers platform independent and not require a config.h, or if this is 
truly impossible then (2) instead of installing config.h, install some scripts 
to allow the user to generate their own config.h, with their own values. 
However, I don't know how much effort either of these options are. Only a few 
installed headers actually need config.h; perhaps these could be fixed to *not* 
require it:

/usr/include/bash$ grep -r '#include .config.h.'
builtins.h:#include "config.h"
lib/glob/strmatch.h:#include <config.h>
shell.h:#include "config.h"
shmbutil.h:#include <config.h>

X

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