Re: Repeatable builds with Visual C++ ?

[Johan Holmberg]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Uwe Schuster wrote:
>
> Johan Holmberg [SMTP:address@hidden wrote:
>
> > I wonder if anyone knows if it is possible to reproduce an exe-file
> > "byte-by-byte" with Visual C++.
> >
[...]
>
> Have a look at the ms-knowledge base article: Q164151 HOWTO: Comparing Binary
> Images of Same Project Builds
>
> You will see, that there are many difficulties and special cases to observe,
> like time-stamps also in ressources, differently linker behaviour between two
> builds (thanks to ms).
>

Many thanks for the pointer to the Knowledge Base article.
As you noted there seems to be a lot of special cases and problems
of all sorts.

When I ran "dumpbin /disasm" I got output files about 120MB large,
and the diffs between successive builds were (sometimes) more than
1M lines long.

It's very hard to tell what differences matter, and what doesn't.

But if I diffed the object files before linking, most of the files
were equal (not counting timestamps). But in about 20 files (out of
500 I tested) there were more differences.

>
> This works fine for us, in the moment, but i think it is not suitable for all
> situations.
>
> Hope that helps.
>

Yes, many thanks.
Even though I couldn't get a simple result from the diffs, at least
I know more about what is possible/impossible with diffing Visual
C++ object/exe-files.

Regards,

Johan Holmberg