Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH 0/3] Fix #1505 and some double quotation issues after #1515

[Evan Hanson]

On 2018-09-09 14:41, address@hidden wrote:
> With eggs, the buil directory will remain, unless purged. Having an
> absolute path allows me to jump directly to the offending file when I get a
> backtrace. I don't see where binary relocation comes into this, different
> users may be an issue, but a minor one. Regarding repeatable builds,
> I'm not sure what you mean in the context of eggs, but perhaps you can
> explain.

By relocation I mean when a program is deployed into a package
repository or otherwise distributed to users. At that point, the paths
are no longer helpful since those directories won't exist. The full
paths also leak information about the build environment, which is part
of the issue with reproducible builds: it makes the outputs sensitive to
where they were compiled, not just in trace buffers but in the C output
too (e.g in file headers) It's similar to the reason we removed dates
from the header comments in 579a9d1e.

I know the full paths are useful in development, especially when you
have something cool like Acme that can access files with a drag of the
mouse (I even copied that for Vim after seeing ma at the meetup), but I
feel that including them in build outputs is prioritising ourselves over
"normal" users.

Best,

Evan