Re: [PATCH 1/1] intl/plural.c: improve reproducibility

[Rical Jasan <ricaljasan at pacific dot net>]

On 11/14/2017 01:51 PM, Juro Bystricky wrote:
> This patch fixes this by insisting on having a proper "bison" installed

Normally, requiring unnecessary dependencies raises a red flag for me,
but I don't think I've ever built glibc on a system that didn't have bison.

Some of the distro maintainers may have a better sense of how ubiquitous
Bison 2.7 or greater is, but checking around a few systems I have, there
are some with 2.4.1.  Arguably, those are getting more and more
difficult to build anything modern on anyway, and I usually build
essential tools from source when I need to do that kind of work.

I've personally never noticed a problem, but the desire to have
consistent binaries in automated builds has merit, in my opinion.
However, I noticed according to the bug report in [1], your fix was to
never regenerate plural.c (which would be the opposite approach).  Here,
you're proposing to always generate it at build time, which should be
consistent with the bison you routinely use, but wouldn't never
regenerating plural.c be more universally consistent across all glibc
builds?  (Updating it in the repo when plural.y changes, of course.)

I'm on the fence about tracking generated files in the first place
(you're not the only one who's been advised they edited the wrong file
:), and I don't see a real problem with your patch, but I think adding a
new hard dependency deserves discussion, so I wanted to kick it off.

Rical

[1] https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12291