Proprietary operating systems
On proprietary operating systems, it is hard to determine if they are tampered with. Typically, they also require non-free compilation tools that can be hard to obtain for users.
The good news is that for some cases, we have free software tools which are able to cross-compile software for proprietary operating systems on free operating systems. Both Bitcoin and Tor Browser have pioneered the technique to build their Windows and Mac OS X versions.
Windows
For Windows, mingw-w64 will build Windows binaries on POSIX compatible operating systems.
NSIS can be used to create integrated installation package.
Both are readily available in several free software distributions.
Mac OS X
crosstool-ng should work to build software for Mac OS X. Sadly this seems to require a non-redistributable part of the Apple SDK. It can be extracted from XCode which can be downloaded at no charge.
Software from Mac OS X is often distributed as disk images (.dmg) which
can be created under GNU/Linux, but it seems to require multiple tools at
the
moment.
Introduction
- Which problems do Reproducible Builds Solve?
- Definitions
- History
- Why reproducible builds?
- Making plans
- Academic publications
Achieve deterministic builds
- Commandments of reproducible builds
- Variations in the build environment
- SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
- Deterministic build systems
- Volatile inputs can disappear
- Stable order for inputs
- Stripping of unreproducible information
- Value initialization
- Version information
- Timestamps
- Timezones
- Locales
- Archive metadata
- Stable order for outputs
- Randomness
- Build path
- System images
- JVM
Define a build environment
- What's in a build environment?
- Recording the build environment
- Definition strategies
- Proprietary operating systems
