Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #129

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 8 and Saturday October 14 2017:

Upcoming events

• On Saturday 21st October, Holger Levsen will present at All Systems Go! in Berlin, Germany on reproducible builds.

• On Tuesday 24th October, Chris Lamb will present at All Things Open 2017 in Raleigh, NC, USA on reproducible builds.

• On Wednesday 25th October, Holger Levsen will present at the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, Czech Republic on reproducible builds.

• From October 31st - November 2nd we will be holding the 3rd Reproducible Builds summit in Berlin. If you are working in the field of reproducible builds, you should totally be there. Please contact us if you have any questions! Quoting from the public invitation mail:

  These dates are inclusive, ie. the summit will be 3 full days from "9 to 5".
  Best arrive on Monday October 30th and leave on the evening of Thursday, 3rd
  at the earliest.
  
  
  Meeting content
  ===============
  
  The exact content of the meeting is going to be shaped by the
  participants, but here are the main goals:
  
   - Update & exchange about the status of reproducible builds in various
     projects.
   - Establish spaces for more strategic and long-term thinking than is possible
     in virtual channels.
   - Improve collaboration both between and inside projects.
   - Expand the scope and reach of reproducible builds to more projects.
   - Brainstorming / Designing several things, eg:
    - designing tools enabling end-users to get the most benefits from
      reproducible builds.
    - design of back-ends needed for that.
   - Work together and hack on solutions.
  
  There will be a huge variety of topics to be discussed. To give a few
  examples:
  - continuing design and development work on .buildinfo infrastructure
  - build-path issues everywhere
  - future directions for diffoscope, reprotest & strip-nondeterminism
  - reproducing signed artifacts such as RPMs
  - discussing formats and tools we can share
  - sharing proposals for standards and documentation helpful to spreading the
    reproducible effort
  - and many many more.
  
  Please think about what you want discuss, brainstorm & learn about at this
  meeting!
  
  
  Schedule
  ========
  
  Preliminary schedule for the three days:
  
  9:00 Welcome and breakfast
  9:30 Meeting starts
  12:30 Lunch
  17:00 End of the official schedule
  
  Gunner and Beatrice from Aspiration will help running the meeting. We will
  collect your input in subsequent emails to make the best of everyone's time.
  Feel free to start thinking about what you want to achieve there. We will also
  adjust topics as the meeting goes.
  
  Please note that we are very likely to spend large parts of the meeting away
  from laptops and closer to post-it notes. So make sure you've answered any
  critical emails *before* Tuesday morning! :)
  

Reproducible work in other projects

Pierre Pronchery reported that that he has built the foundations for doing more reproducibility work in NetBSD.

Packages fixed

Upstream bugs and patches:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • qutim used RANDOM which is unpredictable and unreproducible.
  • dpdk used locale-dependent sort.

Reproducibility non-maintainer uploads in Debian:

• Chris Lamb:
  • mailfront for bugs #777431 & #847020.
  • plib-doc for bugs #778971 & #557676.
  • ipsvd for bugs #777417 & #846890.
• Holger Levsen
  • keyutils for bug #828681.

QA fixes in Debian:

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #878329 filed against sonic-visualiser.
  • #878333 filed against tree-puzzle.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

6 package reviews have been added, 30 have been updated and 37 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Weekly QA work

During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (40)
• Eric Valette (1)
• Markus Koschany (1)

diffoscope development

• Ximin Luo:
  • Containers: diff the metadata of containers in one central location in the code, so that deep-diff works between all combinations of different container types. This lets us finally close #797759.
  • Tests: add a complete set of cases to test all pairs of container types.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Temporarily skip the test for ps2ascii(1) in ghostscript > 9.21 which now outputs text in a slightly different format.
  • UI wording improvements.

reprotest development

Version 0.7.3 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones:

• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a --env-build option for testing builds under different sets of environment variables. This is meant to help the discussion over at #876055 about how we should deal with different types of environment variables in a stricter definition of reproducibility.
  • UI and logging tweaks and improvements.
  • Simplify the _shell_ast module and merge it into shell_syn.

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.