reproducible builds of FreeBSD in a chroot on Linux

[Garrett Cooper]

> On May 7, 2015, at 02:22, Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm one of the people involved in https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
> and have set up https://reproducible.debian.net which continously tests all
> packages in the Debian archive for build reproducibility (so far on amd64
> only).
> 
> For those who don't know, reproducible builds enable everyone to independently
> verify that a given binary comes from specific source. This also allows to
> indirectly verify that one's build system has not been tempered with - and
> more. Please check the first URL of this mail for "the rest of the story".
> 
> And then someone pointed me to https://wiki.freebsd.org/ReproducibleBuilds
> - kudos for how far you already!(!!)
> 
> So now I would like to build freebsd myself, twice, and compare the results
> and show these results as in
> https://reproducible.debian.net/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/gcc-4.9.html - and then
> quite probably set up a jenkins job on jenkins.debian.net and do this every
> week. 
> 
> Here's the catch: I have basically no clue about freebsd - and I want to
> build on Debian linux (on amd64) in a chroot. (And, it will need you people to
> look at the results and eventually fix them!) ;-) 
> 
> So maybe can you help me with my next step. I've found the github freebsd
> repo and cloned it, how to proceed further now?
> 
> $ make buildworld
> Makefile:137: *** missing separator.  Stop.
> 
> in the master branch of git://github.com/freebsd/freebsd wasn't right.. :/ ;)
> 
> 
> Thanks for any help and pointers! I've tried to find documentation on this but
> had no luck so I figured  I could just ask...
> 
> 
> cheers,
>    Holger
> 
> (please cc: me I'm not subscribed.)

Using bmake instead of make like others suggested should get you further, but IIRC you'll have to do some more magic with BOOTSTRAPPING and other things to make the compile work (I think some of the GNU user land tools don't work in other areas of the build). There was some interest in fixing this a while ago, but I didn't have a commit bit at the time so I couldn't do it.

This is something my employer would kind of like to work.

If I get bored and am up at BSDCan, I'll see if I can get this to work on Fedora 20...

Cheers!
-NGie