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

[Roland McGrath]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 6:29 AM, nick clifton <nickc@redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.

Ok.  That meets my minds just fine.

>> What do you have in mind?  It's easy enough to add the information to
>> --help output,
>
> That was what I had in mind.

I can do that.

> 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.

If this were done it seems to me it should be uniformly done for all of
binutils.  That seems like a worthwhile thing, but I don't think I'm going
to bother with it.

> 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.

That makes sense.

> 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.

Will do.


Thanks,
Roland