Debian bookworm live images now reproducible

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

Reproducible builds are important also for: - caching artefacts - ensuring there's no malware somewhere that's been added in the build process

> ensuring there's no malware somewhere that's been added in the build process

i.e. supply-chain safety

It doesn't entirely resolve Thompson's "Trusting Trust" problem, but it goes a long way.

Is it possible for mortals to rebuild gcc from scratch? Can I start with some minimal, auditable compiler (tcc?) and build up to a modern gcc? Or would it be some byzantine path where I need to compile gcc v1998, then perl, then Python 1.8, enabling you to compile gcc v2005, which lets you build Python2.3, etc.