Still reproducible images on rpm-ostree

[Leandro Santiago <leandrosansilva gmail com>]

Well, I am still facing the issue where the initramfs file created
during the tree compose phase is always different, therefore having
different names, and making every update download a whole new file
(which can up to 40MB in size) even if nothing was changed. The
initial issue is described in this bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1235936

It seems the main reason of this issue is that linux uses cpio for
initramfs and the main implementation of cpio (that creates the
images) cannot create deterministic images, as it stores the inodes of
the input files. There is a patched version [1] of cpio which adds an
--reproducible option and aims to reach those cases. The Guix
developers also had the same issue, solving it on their cpio
implementation [2]. Dracut also has a --reproducible option, which
detects whether cpio supports that giver option.

I haven't tested yet them, but I'd like to know if someone else is
facing the same problem and if they'd solved it in another way.

Thank you in advance.

[1] https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/harald/cpio-reproducible/
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2014-11/msg00004.html

-- 
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