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by skydhash 2 days ago
> Being able to reproduce the binary from the source code and being able to verify that it's the same as the original is quite important in some contexts

Why not build your own binaries and be done with that. If you don’t trust the compiler or the machine doing the build, just build the code yourself.
1 comments
robinsonb5 2 days ago
Sure, I can do that, but there's some value in being able to check quickly and easily that, for example, the xz utils binaries shipped by a major distro actually match the published source.

Also useful for checking that a binary containing GPLed code does actually correspond to its published source.

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skydhash 2 days ago
The capability may be nice to have, but what about its usefulness. Would that have been of use in any real world situation?
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