[tor-bugs] #9711 [Tor bundles/installation]: Test out crosstools-ng for Gitian OSX builds (instead of toolchain4 binaries)

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#9711: Test out crosstools-ng for Gitian OSX builds (instead of toolchain4
binaries)
------------------------------------------+-------------------------------
     Reporter:  mikeperry                 |      Owner:  erinn
         Type:  task                      |     Status:  needs_information
     Priority:  normal                    |  Milestone:
    Component:  Tor bundles/installation  |    Version:
   Resolution:                            |   Keywords:  tbb-3.0, gitian
Actual Points:                            |  Parent ID:
       Points:                            |
------------------------------------------+-------------------------------

Comment (by mingwandroid):

 I've concluded that libfaketime is somewhat broken for the use case that
 gitian build requires. I think that some effort to make it do what it is
 supposed to do.

 Some problems I've seen include:

 1. The fake time values are not setup correctly for early calls (at least
 in the MT version any that happen between semaphore creation and the
 getenv("FAKETIME")/getenv("FAKETIME_FMT") calls).
 2. Caching functionality is broken; it doesn't respect the "FAKETIME" env.
 var, merrily replacing it with "+0" instead as soon as it decides that the
 cached values are too old. This means that long running processes stop
 faking time properly early in their execution.
 3. nano-second values are never touched for the stat family of functions -
 or likely any that call fake_time - and gnumake uses nanoseconds for
 dependency checking. Without fixing this, the dependency timestamp check
 could be replaced with "rand()%1" (Mike's blog post mentions this in point
 4 of "Remaining Build Reproducibility Issues [Millisecond and below
 timestamps are not fixed by libfaketime]")

 I've got a messy patch for these issues that I can share?

 Also, libfaketime doesn't actually effect the real filestamps as written
 to any files, it only intercepts attempts to query these values.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9711#comment:51>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online