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> The base system of NetBSD can be built reproducibly since its 8.0 release! It can be enabled in mk.conf when building NetBSD for instance.

The man page for mk.conf says the option, MKREPRO, defaults to "no", and I'm curious why that's default if the base system supports it.

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I could imagine having the build date embedded into the binary can be helpful, similarly other metadata is probably useful as well.

If it is reproducible I assume bit by bit the same from the same sources. Build date then seems irrelevant as you only need to date/version source. Also I think a metadata file could be put aside as an optional thing.

Compilers embed a lot of metadata (incl. but not limited to build date) into the binaries which changes the final artifact checksum in every compilation.

Removing this information what makes reproducible builds reproducible.

If you want bit-by-bit reproduction, you can't have that metadata inside your final artifact.

I know. I have written about something else.

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