I recently modified release.py and this has meant I have been recreating old tarballs to test my changes. This has highlighted the file
subversion/libsvn_subr/errorcode.inc which is generated by gen-make.py, has content that is produced via Python's errno module with the result that the tarball content depends on the Python version used to roll the tarball. When I recreate 1.9.0-rc2 I see this difference: diff -r subversion-1.9.0-rc2/subversion/libsvn_subr/errorcode.inc subversion-1.9 .0-rc2-orig/subversion/libsvn_subr/errorcode.inc 99c99 < { 95, "ENOTSUP" }, --- > { 95, "EOPNOTSUPP" }, To an extent the change is trivial, this code is only used in SVN_DEBUG builds and even then it doesn't have much effect on how Subversion works. Arguably more important is having our tarballs be reproducible. These symbolic names are a bit tricky to generate and the choice of python means it has be done by gen-make.py rather than configure. There are comments in gen_base.py about this. There is also the question about how portable these symbolic names are to other systems, i.e. Windows. I'm considering a --release flag for gen-make.py that omits this information from the file and thus the tarball. -- Philip