Re:I'll think twice before using GitHub Actions again
by akoboldfrying on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @05:30PM
(#42785909)
>But really containerizing the build environment is not related to deterministic builds
What would you say the goal of containerising builds is, if not reproducibility?
Re:I'll think twice before using GitHub Actions again
by carlmr on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @03:25AM
(#42790411)
They didn't say reproducibility, they said determinism.
If you use a container with the same apt-get commands and the same OS, you already separate out almost all the reproducibility issues. What you get will be a very similar environment.
But it's not deterministic as you point out, that takes a lot more effort.
But really containerizing the build environment is not related to deterministic builds as there’s a lot more work needed to guarantee that. Including possible changes in the application itself.
Lastly you don’t need to use docker or dockerfiles to build containers. You can use whatever tooling you want to create a rootfs and then create an image out of that. A nifty way of actually guaranteeing reproducibility is to use nix to build a container image.