On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 06:31:46PM +0100, Peter Stuge wrote:
Kevin O'Connor wrote:
Once this patch is applied it is possible to get reproducible builds of Xens hvmloader.
I've found the version information to be quite helpful when we get trouble reports - it helps indicate what was being run and who built the code (eg, distribution or local). During development cycles, it helps verify that test runs are executed with the expected code.
What breaks if the version changes?
Reproducible builds; allowing to create a consensus that a particular binary is indeed the correct binary for a particular source code.
That is useful. A solution for stabilizing gcc/binutils output would also need to be found though, and that's a much harder problem.
It should be possible to force a static version with "make VERSION='xyz'", but I'd ask that that not be done for production builds as it makes handling trouble reports harder.
I would recommend to use `git describe --tags --dirty` output, which tells if there are any local modifications.
"git describe" is already there - see my recent email to Ian.
-Kevin