Hey,

Allow me to join the discussion here.

Context:
- I'm the maintainer of Python & Python3 in the OpenWrt distro, and (since a while) we also care about reproducible builds.
- The person [Alexander Couzens] who's leading the effort for OpenWrt, has pinged me about Python(3) and packages [to see about making them reproducible]
- In OpenWrt we *only* ship .pyc files, because of performance considerations [.pyc can be 10x faster than .py on some SoCs], and size limitation [we cannot allow auto .pyc generation since it can be expensive on RAM [ < 32 MB systems ] or flash [ ~8 MB sizes ] ; believe it or not, people run Python on something like this

Current status:
- so far I've implemented a simple change to Python & Python3 here:
  https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/5303/commits/1b6dd4781f901a769718c49f6f255c15fd376f6e
- that has improved reproduce-ability quite a bit : only binaries are not reproduce-able now
- when I did this [1-2 weeks ago] I did not think of checking of any bug/issue opened here [ I only thought if this now ]
- I only checked what other distros may do regarding Python:
  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.html

References:
- initial discussion on OpenWrt: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/issues/5278
- PR with discussion: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/5303
- current OpenWrt reproducible state [with the patch applied]: https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/lede/lede_ar71xx.html

I wanted to share my [and our] interest in this.

If we can help in any way, feel free to ping.

I will try to hack/patch some more stuff in the current Python releases to make them fully reproducible [for us], and probably share the results here.
When PEP 552 gets implemented and there will be a Python we will switch to them.
Atm, in trunk we package Python 2.7.14 & Python 3.6.4

Thanks
Alex