[Pkg-octave-devel] Get octave-communications to build reproducibly

[Rafael Laboissière]

* Oliver Heimlich <oheim at posteo.de> [2016-07-26 23:00]:

> On 26.07.2016 20:33, Rafael Laboissière wrote:
>> I am trying to have the octave-communications package building
>> reproducibly [1].  I followed the instructions in the wiki page [2] and
>> did the commit 3b602b6 [3].  However, the package still does not build
>> reproducibly. Does anyone know how to do it?
>
> Since the differences are in the manual I suspected the images generated 
> for the manual. There are three images that get generated for the manual 
> using doc/commsimages.m: awgn, eyediagram, and scatterplot.
>
> - awgn uses random numbers, but seeds them with randn ("state", 10), so 
> this should be reproducible.
>
> - eyediagram and scatterplot use the function randsrc without a 4th seed 
> parameter. The randsrc function uses the rand function internally, which 
> uses a different RNG state compared to randn. So this probably is the 
> reason.

Thanks for the suggestions Oliver.  Indeed, setting the seed of the 
random number generators help a lot, but is still not enough, because 
there is name of a temporary file (/tmp/oct-??????) that gets included 
in the PDF image files.  I will try to fix this latter.

Rafael