Bug free is less important for reproducible builds, so long as the bugs are reproducible. Compiler bugs are of course still a problem for other reasons.

My point is only that even when the software is correct, the reproducible build rate will either be 100% or we've got a representative sample set.

Until then, those issues will continue to be lumped together with all the software reasons it wasn't reproducible.

Sounds like a mechanism to test for bad hardware (akin to memtest86) and find compiler bugs =)

In a slightly different form, this has already happened: https://julialang.org/blog/2020/09/rr-memory-magic/

Bingo - even if we do everything right the percentage of matching builds isn't expected to be 100%. If it is, there just aren't enough samples.

My first Pentium could usually but not always math correctly until Intel replaced it during a recall.