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[PATCH] Facilitate deterministic pe executables between linker invocations

nick clifton nickc@redhat.com
Thu Oct 10 14:11:00 GMT 2013 
Hi Cory,

[Sorry for the delay in replying]

> Only a tiny change is needed to avoid the random result. An
> (entirely arbitrary) value of 1 is hard-coded rather than using the current
> timestamp.
>
> Is there a historical reason for the non-deterministic behavior?

Yes. :-)

Oh, you want to know the reason ?  I believe that this is because 
non-deterministic behaviour was not considered to be important, and that 
having a timestamped executable was thought to be a helpful feature. 
(For example the timestamp could be used like a build-id to identify a 
specific release of a binary to a customer).


> If so, would
> it be reasonable to add an option similar to enable-deterministic-archives to
> disable it?

Yes it would.

Cheers
   Nick
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