The term "Reproducible Builds" refers to making sure the build process for various artifacts is so deterministic that building the same sources twice results in a bit-by-bit identical artifact. You can read more about it on https://reproducible-builds.org/.

One of the advantages of Reproducible Builds is that, when those two builds happen on independently-managed infrastructure, validating that both environments produce the same bit-by-bit artifact improves the confidence that no backdoor or other malware was injected into the artifact due to a compromise of the infrastructure.

Reproducible Builds for ASF releases

It is good practice for all artifacts released by the ASF to be reproducible. For projects that want to build and sign artifacts on CI, Reproducible Builds are required. This means:

• your builds must be deterministic enough that independent builds produce bit-by-bit identical artifacts
• you have documented how and when artifacts are actually independently rebuilt and verified in your release process
• you follow this process in practice.

Ecosystem-specific notes

Java / Maven

If you have a project that is built with Apache Maven, refer to the Configuring for Reproducible Builds guide.