[Python-Dev] PEP 552: deterministic pycs

[Benjamin Peterson]

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017, at 14:54, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Thu, 07 Sep 2017 14:32:19 -0700
> Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Not sure how common that situation is (certainly the source tree wasn't
> > > read-only when you checked it out or untar'ed it), but isn't it easily
> > > circumvented by copying the source tree before building?  
> > 
> > Well, yes, in these kind of "batch" build situations, copying is
> > probably fine. However, I want to be able to have pyc determinism even
> > when developing. Copying the entire source every time I change something
> > isn't a nice.
> 
> Hmm... Are you developing from a read-only source tree?

No, but the build system is building from one (at least conceptually).

> 
> > The larger point is that while the SOURCE_EPOCH patch will likely work
> > for Linux distributions, I'm interested in being able to have
> > deterministic pycs in "normal" Python development workflows.
> 
> That's an interesting idea, but is there a concrete motivation or is it
> platonical?  After all, if you're changing something in the source tree
> it's expected that the overall "signature" of the build will be
> modified too.

Yes, I have used Bazel to build pycs. Having pycs be deterministic
allows interesting build system optimizations like Bazel distributed
caching to work well for Python.