Removing build metadata, for reproducible kernel builds

[Ed Maste]

On 3 December 2015 at 21:35, Justin Hibbits <jrh29 at alumni.cwru.edu> wrote:
>
> svnversion resulting in a 'nnnnnnM'?

Warner suggested this in the review also, and it might be a good way
to choose a default. In any case it's clear that there's strong (and
reasonable) objection to enabling this by default for all builds, so
I'll not commit the change as-is.

I believe there are three separate issues here:

1) It should be possible to build the kernel reproducibly. I hope this
isn't contentious.

2) Control over enabling reproducible builds -- build knob or no,
default to on/off, based on svnversion including 'M', forced on for
release builds, etc.

3) Some tools rely on the current format / data, and will need to be fixed.

I expect to make a change so that a reproducible build is possible,
but not introduce a new knob or change anything by default. After that
I'll work on the issues in #3 and once that's done we can start the
bikeshed about whether there should be a knob, what the default should
be etc.

Thanks all for the feedback.