Stefan Monnier monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA writes:
Thanks. BTW, I notice that my PDF is *very* different (as in: the end of the intro sometimes is a bit before the end of the 1st page and sometimes a bit after) depending on which machine I run pdflatex. Part of the difference between the two machines is that one has Debian stable the other has Debian testing, but maybe the cause is elsewhere. It's the first time I see such large differences without an actual teX error along the way.
That's alarming. It would be surprising if TeX itself produced different output, but with so many packages on top of other packages, a different version of the TeX-live tree could probably do it, I guess.
I've been playing with NixOS lately -- as in, wasting enough time on it that I made it my primary laptop and email server distro -- so I'm interested in the idea of *reproducible builds*. Nix seems to go pretty far toward supporting the idea, but it does so by relying on a half-gigabyte repository of "nix pkgs", which itself doesn't even contain much upstream source, so in turn it relies on collections of repositories that have differing standards for releasing and archiving.
All upstream sources are checksummed, but even so... that means you can definitely *detect* when you don't have the exact same build, I'm not sure how far it goes to ensuring you always will be able to *reproduce* some historical build. But anyway...
CL