Discussing the current status of .buildinfo files

build info craziness

• Limitations Debian implem of build info
• no checksum of dependencies in build info, deb limitation: #802241 (debian bug)
• no checksum of the source code.
• no architecture of the installed dependencies (e.g arm installed on x86_64, cross-compilation, multi arch binaries, …)
• no actual specification of build info, only a man page of the debian implementation
• other implementation: archlinux, OBS (open build service – openSUSE). Need to follow-up on openSUSE buildenv.
• man pages missing some information
• Lot of things called build info but not necessary build info.
• what is debian specific in build info?
• None of the field is debian specific
• But format might be
• do we want to have a single format for all distribution?
• Not essential…
• But ease the adoption of repro build: easier to compare, easier to share tooling, …
• Maybe they want to use something that feel native to them
• Build info specification on the debian wiki
• Do we need to have a repro-build level specification? (in https://reproducible-build.org/specs)

We narrowly avoided an argument about csh

• Build info file for ISO distribution, what format would that be?
• A separate topic that other people might want to discuss? Not a topic for us now.