[ipxe-devel] BUILD_ID_CMD := perl -e 'printf "0x%08x", int ( rand ( 0xffffffff ) ); '

[Heinrich Schuchardt]

Hello Michael,

Linux distributions are struggling hard to create reproducible builds.
This means if you run the make script twice you should get exactly the
same binary. Cf. https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Currently iPXE is introducing a random number as build id:

# Command to generate build ID.  Must be unique for each $(BIN)/%.tmp,
# even within the same build run.
#
BUILD_ID_CMD    := perl -e 'printf "0x%08x", int ( rand ( 0xffffffff ) );'

Random number do not give any guarantee that they are unique. So this is
not only disadvantageous for creating reproducible builds but simply buggy.

A better solution would be to simply delete temporary files.

Best regards

Heinrich