Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #144

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 21 and Saturday January 27 2018:

Media coverage

• On Jan 24th Chris Lamb presented at Linux.conf.au on our Diffoscope tool.

Development and fixes in key packages

• Mattia uploaded dpkg (1.19.0.5.0~reproducible1) to our experimental toolchain.

• cpython-3.7 now has .pyc files without timestamps. Most work happening in PEP 552 but older Python versions probably still need variants of the mtime patch because the new .pyc format is not compatible.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #887866 filed against cxref.
  • #887929 filed against trigger-rally.
  • #887931 filed against gazebo.
  • #887968 filed against zoneminder.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #887987 filed against zorp.
  • #887989 filed against kopano-webapp.
  • #888049 filed against mdds.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • obs-build (merged, sort hash randomness)
  • gap (merged, use SDE, drop config.log)
  • brp-check-suse (.a file normalization)

Reviews of unreproducible packages

35 package reviews have been added, 37 have been updated and 91 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 (24)
• Niels Thykier (8)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Report differences in extended file attributes when comparing files. #888401
  • Show extended filesystem metadata (etc.) even when directly comparing two files, not just when we specify two directories. #888402
  • Optionally compare JSON files using Python jsondiff module. #888112
  • Explicitly depend on e2fsprogs. #887180
  • Do some “fuzzy matching” to detect JSON files not named .json.
• Juliana Oliveira (parallel diffoscope work):
  • Fix FIFO writing and parsing from stdout
  • Make dill import depend on Config.parallel
  • Add STDERR_MAX_LINES back
  • Replace .wait() override with .returncode
  • Remove decode from stdout
  • Replace .stderr_content with .stderr
• Ximin Luo:
  • Restore the behaviour of file comparison and –exclude-directory-metadata
  • Fix test by running compare_root_paths to set global defaults
  • Long-term fix for a shared-singleton issue

reproducible-website development

• Holger Levsen:
  • Correct sponsorship reference for the recent summit

jenkins.debian.net development

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Enable stretch-bpo on the “pb7” machine
  • Drop a misleading comment in html_repository_comparison

Misc.

This week’s edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.