Published at LXer:

“Reproducible builds” is a way to ensure that the source code for any software and the binary code resulting from building that source code are matched byte-for-byte

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I have been hearing about “Reproducible builds” for a while, I heard NetBSD is close to that too.

But I do not understand the benefit of “Reproducible builds”, it's not like you are compiling OS objects every other day

You don't understand the benefit of being able to verify that a compiled binary hasn't been tampered with?

People who distribute Arch and Debian do compile and distribute packages every day. They are the ones who want to be able to say "yes, this package matches this source code".

If a vulnerability is discovered in package X, they want to be able to say "despite a vulnerability in X, we can confirm other packages were not tampered with", or indeed "we found package Y and Z were also modified and must be replaced, but others were unaffected".