Re: [PATCH] bitbake.conf: add whoami to HOSTTOOLS

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, 2017-03-30 at 00:52 +0200, Andrea Adami wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 12:24 AM, Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 2017-03-29 at 23:09 +0200, Andreas Oberritter wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Wed, 29 Mar 2017 22:45:17 +0200
> > > Andrea Adami <andrea.adami@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Spotted in log do_compile of linux:
> > > > 
> > > >  /tmp/build/tmp-glibc/work-shared/c7x0/kernel-
> > > > source/scripts/mkcompile_h:
> > > >  line 46: whoami: command not found
> > > As an alternative, we could set KBUILD_BUILD_USER (and possibly
> > > KBUILD_BUILD_HOST) to a fixed or machine-based value in
> > > kernel.bbclass'
> > > EXTRA_OEMAKE variable, which could also improve the
> > > reproducibility
> > > of
> > > builds.
> > Agreed, I already suggested we should figure out how to pass in a
> > deterministic value and said I would not accept a patch to add
> > whoami
> > to HOSTTOOLS.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Richard
> Hello,
> 
> well, I'm all for reproducible builds.
> But there is the fact that this is the standard kernel behavior and
> we
> never limited the user choices about how to build/configure a kernel.

Just because this is the standard kernel behaviour, it doesn't mean its
"right" for us.

There are multiple issues here:

a) Builds are not deterministic
b) Builds leak "host" information about the user that built it

So we've identified an issue which I believe is something our general
userbase (who are asking for reproducibility) will want us to fix, even
if its not the upstream default kernel behaviour.

The fact there is a kconfig option for this and a way to override it
suggest even the upstream kernel people accept this is something people
will want to configure.

Cheers,

Richard