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Stable order for inputs

If building your software requires processing several inputs at once, make sure the order is stable across builds.

A typical example is creating an archive from the content of a directory. Most filesystems do not guarantee that listing files in a directory will always result in the same order.

Example Makefile

The following Makefile will result in unreproducible builds1:

SRCS = $(wildcard *.c)
tool: $(SRCS:.c=.o)
	$(CC) -o $@ $^

Solutions:

a) List all inputs explicitly and ensure they will be processed in that order.

SRCS = util.c helper.c main.c
tool: $(SRCS:.c=.o)
	$(CC) -o $@ $^

b) Sort inputs:

SRCS = $(sort $(wildcard *.c))
tool: $(SRCS:.c=.o)
	$(CC) -o $@ $^

When sorting inputs, one must ensure that the sorting order is not affected by the system locale settings. Some locales will not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase characters.

For example, tar will by default use the filesystem order when descending directories:

$ tar -cf archive.tar src

A solution is to use find and sort but the following might still have differences when run under different locales:

$ find src -print0 | sort -z |
    tar --no-recursion --null -T - -cf archive.tar

The locale used to sort files must be specified to avoid any surprises:

$ find src -print0 | LC_ALL=C sort -z |
    tar --no-recursion --null -T - -cf archive.tar

This might not be the only change required for Tar and other archive formats as they usually embed more metadata problems.

  1. GNU Make used to sort the output of the wildcard function until version 3.82. ↩

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