Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 23 and Saturday April 29 2017:
Past and upcoming events
On April 26th Chris Lamb gave a talk at foss-north 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden on Reproducible Builds.
Between May 5th-7th the Reproducible Builds Hackathon 2017 will take place in Hamburg, Germany.
Then on May 26th Bernhard M. Wiedemann will give a talk titled reproducible builds in openSUSE (2017) at the openSUSE Conference 2017 in Nürnberg, Germany.
Media coverage
Already on April 19th Sylvain Beucler wrote a yet another follow-up post Practical basics of reproducible builds 3, after part 1 and part 2 of his series.
Toolchain development and fixes
Michael Woerister of the Rust project has implemented file
maps that affect all
path-related compiler information, including “error messages, metadata,
debuginfo, and the file!() macro alike”. Ximin Luo with support from some
other Rust developers and contributors helped steer the final result into
something that was compatible with reproducible builds. Many thanks to all
involved, especially for the patience of discussing this over several months.
Ximin wrote a first-attempt patch to fix R build-path issues. It made 460/477 R packages reproducible, but also caused 3 of these to FTBFS. See randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases for details.
Bugs filed and patches sent upstream
Chris Lamb:
Bernhard M. Wiedemann filed a number of patches upstream:
- intltool
- xine-ui
- tboot
- javapackages
- mxml, which got merged already.
- calibre, also merged.
- wammu, merged as well.
Reviews of unreproducible packages
102 package reviews have been added, 64 have been updated and 24 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.
3 issue types have been updated:
- Added captures_build_path_in_beam_files, recategorise some erlang packages with captures_build_path into this issue instead.
- Removed timestamps_in_beam_files.
- Holger started reviewing blacklisted_on_jenkins and blacklisted_on_jenkins_armhf_only and found quite some packages which don’t need to be blacklisted anymore.
Weekly QA work
During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:
- Aaron M. Ucko (1)
- Adrian Bunk (1)
- Chris Lamb (4)
- Santiago Vila (2)
diffoscope development
diffoscope 82 was uploaded to experimental by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:
- Chris Lamb:
- Add support for Ogg Vorbis files.
- Vagrant Cascadian:
- Add support for .dtb (device tree blob) files. (Closes: #861109).
Changes from previous weeks that were also released with 82:
- Ximin Luo
- Add support for R .rds and .rdb object files.
- Chris Lamb
- Add support for comparing Pcap files.
- Add support for .docx and .odt files via docx2txt & odt2txt.
- Add support for PGP files via pgpdump.
- Various documentation and test improvements.
- Various bug fixes and code quality improvements.
- Sylvain Beucler
- Display differences in zip platform-specific timestamps.
Misc.
This week’s edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.
