[Therion] new Therion 5.5.0

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 09:22:31PM +0200, Benedikt Hallinger wrote:
> what does --reproducible-output exactly do?
> i cannot derive this from the thbook. What does reproducible mean?

It means that the output is exactly (bit-for-bit) determined by the
input.  For example, Therion uses pseudo-random numbers for drawing some
symbols so we need to seed the random number generator the same way to
get a reproducible output.

For normal Therion use, non-reproducible output probably doesn't matter
(though sometimes you might prefer that the rocks don't move just
because you regenerated the PDF), but it's very useful for getting
Therion packages to build reproducibly because Therion itself is used to
generate output for the examples as part of the build.

There's been a move over the last few years to make Free and Open
Source Software build reproducibly - for example, the majority of
packages in Debian now do:

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/unstable/amd64/stats_pkg_state.png

If you're wondering why that's a good thing, some motivations are
covered here:

https://reproducible-builds.org/

Cheers,
    Olly