Ability to create reproducible images with debos #528
Description
I am working towards reproducible builds for a project that I am involved in which uses debos. We use a few ext4 and vfat partitions in our disk images and I am trying to make the filesystem images reproducible.
The below example is more specific to a use case that I am involved in, hence the example of the ext4 filesystem.
e2fsprogs v1.47.1 supports creating reproducible ext4 filesystem images. This works fine when the contents of the filesystem are provided at filesystem creation time. But as per my understanding of debos (looking at [1]) debos creates the partitions first (ex: ext4) and then mounts the partitions based on the mount points specified in the recipes (image-partition action).
The mount operation updates the last mounted and last write time stamps in the ext4 filesystem metadata and copying files into a mounted filesystem also seems to add some non-determinism which leads to reproducibility issues.
Similar problems may be present with other types of filesystems that are currently supported by debos.
I would like to understand if there are any plans in the future to support reproducible builds with debos.
[1] https://github.com/go-debos/debos/blob/main/actions/image_partition_action.go#L620