On Sat, 04 Apr 2009, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > Could someone explain to me what the big deal in the first place is? > Does having an extra boolean really make the world a horrible place? > So MKREPRO will set MKARZERO, what's the big deal? Why is this worth > getting upset about? Jeesh.
The big deal is that you went ahead and used MKARZERO in the face of overwhelming opposition during the discussion in tech-toolchain. Everybody who commented said that they thought there should be a single tunable flag for reproducible builds, not a separate user-tunable flag for each little thing. You have claimed that the functionality currently controled by MKARZERO (use zero instead of timestamps in object archives) needs to be user-tunable, but I haven't seen (or don't remember) an explanation or example for why it can't be controlled by an internal variable (possibly named "_MKARZERO"), which would automatically be set from a user-tunable variable such as MKDETERMINISTIC or MKREPRODUCIBLE. --apb (Alan Barrett)