Debian bookworm live images now reproducible

I don't get how someone achieves reproducibility of builds: what about files metadata like creation/modification timestamps? Do they forge them? Or are these data treated as not important enough (like it 2 files with different metadata but identical contents should have the same checksum when hashed)?

Debian uses a tool called `strip-nondeterminism` to help with this in part: https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/strip-nondeterm...

There's lots of info on the Debian site about their reproducibility efforts, and there's a story from 2024's DebConf that may be of interest: https://lwn.net/Articles/985739/

I see this is written in Perl, is that the case with most Debian tooling?

It’s helpful to think of Perl as a superior bash, rather than a worse python, when it comes to scripting.

How is that helpful to ignore a better alternative just because a worse one exists?

They precisely say they use it as a better alternative to bash. Obviously they don't think that Python is a better alternative here... or did I misunderstand the question?

Not obvious to me that they think Python is worse than Perl, and make the phrase even less sensible.