[Distutils] reproducible builds

[Thomas Kluyver]

Flit already supports $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for building wheels.

I think the environment variable is a good idea: if it gets wide
support, you will be able to set a single thing to affect lots of
different build tools, rather than working out where you need to add
command line arguments to half a dozen different build steps.

Thomas

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017, at 05:33 PM, Matthias Bussonnier wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com>
> wrote:
> > An issue has been raised for reportlab to support a specific environment
> > variable namely SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. The intent is that we should get our time
> > from this variable rather than time.localtime(time.time()) so that produced
> > documents are more invariant.
> >
> > First off is this a reasonable request? The variable is defined by debian
> > here https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/
> >
> > What happens if other distros decide not to use this environment variable?
> > Do I really want distro specific code in the package?
> 
> For what it is worth, it seem like it will make its way into CPython as
> well:
> https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/296
> 
> And IFAICT, this env variable naming is already more than just debian.
> 
> -- 
> M
> 
> 
> >
> > In addition we already have our own mechanism for making the produced
> > documents
> > invariant although it might require an extension to support externally
> > specified date & time as in the debian variable.
> >
> > In short where does the distro responsibility and package maintainers
> > boundary need to be?
> > --
> > Robin Becker
> > _______________________________________________
> > Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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