[PATCH] GNU_AR_DETERMINISTIC env var, --enable-deterministic-archives

[nick clifton]

Hi Roland,


> I agree with this as a general principle.  (But it's worth pointing out
> that GCC is indeed affected by various environment variables--which, at
> least, are documented in their own section of the GCC manual.)

True.

> Well, it's just not very true at all about GCC.  But I take your point.
> However, you didn't say anything about the build-time configure option.

Sorry, I should have covered that.

I am OK with the configure option.  In fact I think that it is the best 
way forward.  Allow users (or toolchain providers) to choose what the 
default behaviour will be, and provide a command line option to 
explicitly determine determinism.


>> Also - there needs to be some way for the user to find out how the
>> particular ar/ranlib that they are using was configured.
>
> What do you have in mind?  It's easy enough to add the information to
> --help output,

That was what I had in mind.

> but that is not programmatically friendly.

True.  Another option would be to have "ar --verbose" display the 
configure arguments that were used when it was built.  Ie similar to the 
way that gcc behaves.

> But I don't
> really see why someone really needs to know the default.

I was thinking more about debugging again.  If user reports a strange 
behaviour with ar not storing file timestamps say, then we can ask them 
to run "ar --help" or "ar --verbose" and explain what the output means.


So - if you will accept dropping the environment variable and just using 
a configure time parameter to set the default behaviour then please do 
resubmit your patch.

Cheers
   Nick