[bug#48721] [PATCH v2] gnu: gcc-8: Make static libs reproducible

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Carl,

Carl Dong <contact@carldong.me> skribis:

>> Well done.  Did you observe it in practice?  (On ‘core-updates’ maybe?)
>
> Thanks! Yes, we observed it when switching back from gcc-9 to gcc-8 for
> compiling Bitcoin Core. We use -static-libstdc++, which means that any
> non-reproducibility in libstdc++.a propagates into our produced binaries as
> well.

OK.

> To be clear, I was only able to identify the problem and fix thanks to your
> patch here:
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/patches/dico-libtool-deterministic.patch?h=b6094b1f0a6760b9f5296364cf5edb8a2e64953c

Oh.  (I suppose GCC doesn’t have a single ‘ltmain.sh’ that we could
patch instead of all these ‘configure’ scripts, right?)

>> I’m surprised that this is still an issue since this was fixed in
>> Libtool proper long ago, probably before GCC 8 was released.
>
> Right, unfortunately GCC maintains their own version of libtool, which hasn't
> been synced with upstream for a while. I documented the details here: 
> https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/archives/#gnu-libtool

Great that you documented it!

> This fixes the nonreproducibility in gcc documented here:
> https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/archives/#gnu-libtool
>
> * gnu/packages/patches/gcc-8-sort-libtool-find-output.patch: New patch.
> * gnu/local.mk (dist_patch_DATA): Register it.
> * gnu/packages/gcc.scm (gcc-8)[source]: Apply it.
> ---
>  gnu/local.mk                                  |   1 +
>  gnu/packages/gcc.scm                          |   3 +-
>  .../gcc-8-sort-libtool-find-output.patch      | 399 ++++++++++++++++++

LGTM and OK for ‘master’.  Thanks!

Ludo’.