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Debian bookworm live images now reproducible

(lwn.net)
766 points bertman | 1 comments | 26 Mar 25 17:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.279s | source
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c0l0 ◴[26 Mar 25 17:43 UTC] No.43484720[source]▶
I never really understood the hype around reproducible builds. It seems to mostly be a vehicle to enable tivoization[0] while keeping users sufficiently calm. With reproducible buiilds, a vendor can prove to users that they did build $binary from $someopensourceproject, and then digitally sign the result so that it - and only it - would load and execute on the vendor-provided and/or vendor-controlled platform. But that still kills effective software freedom as long as I, the user, cannot do the same thing with my own build (whether it is unmodified or not) of $someopensourceproject.

Therefore, I side with Tavis Ormandy on this debate: https://web.archive.org/web/20210616083816/https://blog.cmpx...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

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oulipo ◴[26 Mar 25 17:45 UTC] No.43484754[source]▶
Reproducible builds are important also for: - caching artefacts - ensuring there's no malware somewhere that's been added in the build process
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1. mjevans ◴[26 Mar 25 17:57 UTC] No.43484893[source]▶
Auditors can take a copy of the source, reproducibly build it themselves, and thus prove that the binaries someone would like to run match the provided source code.