Re: [PATCH 1/1] rootfs-postcommands.bbclass: sort passwd entries

[Phil Blundell <pb@pbcl.net>]

On Thu, 2017-01-05 at 16:38 +0100, Patrick Ohly wrote:
> The /etc passwd files in a rootfs consist of the default entries from
> base-passwd plus anything that gets added by preinst scripts or
> extrausers.bbclass.
> 
> The execution order of preinst scripts is not perfectly
> deterministic,
> or at least unrelated changes caused it to change in a
> non-deterministic way, resulting in irrelevant changes in the order
> of
> passwd entries.
> 
> Such re-ordering is bad for reproducible builds and file-based update
> mechanisms like swupd which work best if changes are as minimal as
> possible.
> 
> To achieve that, the files get sorted in a post-processing command,
> enabled by default.

Won't the numeric UIDs still be non-deterministic, though?  If the goal
is reproducible builds then it doesn't sound as though this quite fixes
the problem.

p.