[tor-bugs] #3688 [Tor bundles/installation]: Deterministic builds

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#3688: Deterministic builds
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 Reporter:  mikeperry                 |          Owner:  mikeperry                    
     Type:  enhancement               |         Status:  assigned                     
 Priority:  major                     |      Milestone:  TorBrowserBundle 2.3.x-stable
Component:  Tor bundles/installation  |        Version:                               
 Keywords:  tbb-2.2.32-5              |         Parent:                               
   Points:                            |   Actualpoints:                               
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Changes (by hiviah):

 * cc: ondrej.mikle@… (added)


Comment:

 I did a test building 0.2.3.20 Tor rpms (just the daemon, not whole TBB)
 on two Fedora 17 and one Scientific Linux 6 machines using mock (mock is a
 Redhat tool builds in a chroot environment with cleanly downloaded
 dependencies and toolchain; it can cross-compile as well).

 Suprisingly the resulting tor binaries ended up identical accross build
 machines as long as the target configuration was identical, e.g. every
 binary built for 'epel-6-x86_64' configuration was bit-identical. Around
 10 combinations [build_machine, target_configuration] were tried.

 Then I ran a TBB build and tried to build some of the components
 deterministically. Qt 4.8.2 from src.rpm gave me almost identical builds
 (compared to distro libs), libQtCore.so and libQtGui.so differing only in
 24 and 27 bytes, respectively. The differences appear in strings like
 'qt_instdate=2012-08-11' and the ELF NOTE program header.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3688#comment:21>
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