[newnewpdro]

It makes a substantial difference when we're talking about open software the distributor builds from source. The major distributors set a relatively high standard for the build process.

The same cannot be said for developers in my experience, who often don't even see a problem with the build process accessing the network - and frequently will publish releases built from the same host environment they use for their general daily computing.

From the perspective of a distributor, the packages should be perfectly buildable (and for official releases, preferably so) with a toolchain of known provenance in a clean environment without network connectivity.

The priorities are quite different for the developer of software and the distributor of systems incorporating that software. It's similar to the tension between system administrators and developers.