Subject: Re: bug#44559: gnutls 3.6.12 fails to build: FAIL: status-request-revoked

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:17:40 +0200

Hi,

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> skribis:

> I lost track of the details -- is this problem still likely to bite us
> in the future, or was something committed to mitigate against it?

“Time bombs” are the worst of non-reproducibility bugs because (1) we
don’t have workarounds other than changing the system time on the
machine that performs the build, and (2) we currently lack a way to
detect them.

In this thread, Chris and I proposed addressing #2 by offering ways to
automatically or manually run builds “in the future”¹.  We could actually
similarly address #1 by running builds “in the past”.

In any case, the first step is probably to offer a VM service for Guix
System, similar to childhurd, with an option to specify the starting
time.

So we’re not done yet, but the discussion has drifted beyond the
original GnuTLS bug report, so perhaps we can close it and take it
elsewhere?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ QEMU can be passed an option like “-rtc base=2020-01-01”.