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I would not expect SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to sacrifice performance. During packaging, SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is always set, and sometimes we need to perform expensive operations. We only need this behavior during cache generation, making the solution not optimal.
Backtracking a bit to your proposal for sorting the elements. Is it possible to have two different types with the same name? We need a unique identifier for each type.
After that, we need the type to allow sorting/comparing items, which AFAIK is not something we can guarantee.
We could certainly do the sorting where we are able to, and bail out if impossible, which I feel should handle the majority of cases. This is not optimal, but reasonable.
Is there any way we could something like resetting the hash seed during cache generation?