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Re: Comparing binaries automatically
> On Dec 19, 2017, at 6:06 AM, Simon Richter <Simon.Richter@hogyros.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 19.12.2017 05:48, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>
>> Anyone know of a way to do a “smart” comparison of executables (or relocatable objections, or shared libraries, or…)?
>
> The Debian Reproducible Builds project has a tool called "diffoscope",
> as well as a few years experience reproducing compilation results, so
> this may be a good starting point:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
>
> They don't have a good solution for __DATE__ yet though, unless you
> consider a compiler flag warning about its use a solution.
>
> Simon
>
Yeah, I’ve seen a variety of approaches to the __DATE__/__TIME__/__TIMESTEMP__ problem, including setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to the mtime of the youngest file in the tarball or the timestamp of the most recent git commit, etc. (although squashing/rebasing commits tends to screw up their timestamp in that the code might be changed/updated but the timestamp remains that of the original commit not the rebased once).
No perfect solution.
Will have a look at diffoscope, thanks.
-Philip