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Build path

Some tools will record the path of the source files in their output.

Most compilers write the path of the source in the debug information in order to locate the associated source files.

Some tools have flags (like gzip’s -n) that prevent them from writing the path in their output. Proposing patches to add a similar feature in other tools might be sufficiently easy.

In most cases however, post-processing is required to either remove the build path or to normalize it to a predefined value.

For the specific case of debug symbols, there is currently no good post-processing tool to change them to a pre-determined value1. A work-around is to define the build path as part of the build environment, however reprotest changes it so this makes it harder to assess reproducibility. Certain compiler flags can work around the issue:

  • -fdebug-prefix-map=OLD=NEW can strip directory prefixes from debug info. (available in all GCC versions, Clang 3.8)
  • -fmacro-prefix-map=OLD=NEW is similar to -fdebug-prefix-map, but addresses irreproducibility due to the use of __FILE__ macros and alike. (available since GCC 8, Clang support is pending)
  • -ffile-prefix-map=OLD=NEW is an alias for both -fdebug-prefix-map and -fmacro-prefix-map. (available since GCC 8, Clang support is pending)

Note that some packages save the compile options in the build output.

This is also problematic because this will also apply to intermediate source files that other tools generate. As they typically will use random file names, having a fixed build path is not enough in such cases.

A build-path-prefix-map specification is in discussion with the GCC developers.

  1. debugedit can replace the path used at build time by a predefined one but it does that by rewriting bytes in place. As this does not reorder the hash table of strings, the resulting bytes are still depending on the original build path.

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