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Reproducibility from source and build env are fundamental to science or making changes to improve something. Without these, it can appear to signal hoarded proprietariness waving the banner of FLOSS or just a poorly-maintained project without high standards, even if it were unintentional.

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> Reproducibility from source and build env are fundamental to science or making changes to improve something. Without these, it can appear to signal hoarded proprietariness waving the banner of FLOSS or just a poorly-maintained project without high standards, even if it were unintentional.

I am typing this on a system running Gentoo that has only 3 proprietary packages installed, with one being Intel's microcode. In time, I hope to lower that number to zero. If you are concerned about this and do not run a source-based distribution, I suggest that you switch.

Source-based distributions are not the only solution. >> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

That requires making the builds easy to do, such that Matthew's claim that people cannot easily build things themselves probably is not valid. At least not if that project succeeds.

Anyway, I am happy to see that building from source is becoming easier for users of Debian and presumably Ubuntu by extension.

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