Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #151

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday March 11 and Saturday March 17 2018:

• Mattia Rizzolo updated our patched version of GCC to 7.3.0-11. This includes our patches to support BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP.

• Chris Lamb added support for comparing Gnumeric spreadsheets to our diffoscope tool (#893311) as well as updated the tests tests for openjdk-9 (#893183).

• The arm64 network in our test build framework came back after some protracted downtime caused by a hardware issue.

• 63 package reviews were added to our package notes adding to our knowledge about identified issues. In additiom, 43 entries were updated and 38 were been removed, A timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_inkscape toolchain issue was also added.

• Isaac Z. Schlueter updated the npm package manager for JavaScript applications to use a fixed, deterministic modification time when creating archives. Due to a limitation in the ZIP archive format, they opted for 26th October 1985 instead.

• The latest release of Tails (3.6) is no longer reproducible.

• Heise reported on a trojaned version of a BitTorrent client that infected 400,000 computers (German). We believe such attacks would be detected quicker with a combination of free software and reproducible builds.

• Mathieu Boespflug and Théophane Hufschmitt posted about using Bazel and Nix to achieve fully-reproducible builds.

• Holger Levsen added yocto to our list of partner projects as they mention “Binary Reproducibility” as a feature.

Upcoming events

• On Tuesday March 20th, Chris Lamb will speak about reproducible builds at the New York Linux Users Group.

• Chris Lamb will also be presenting at LibrePlanet 2018 on reproducible builds on Saturday 24th March.

Patches submitted

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • epic (sent upstream via email)
  • icinga2 (hostname)
  • kubernetes (parallelism, copyright year)
  • lilypond (use convert -strip)
  • marisa (drop date)
  • mono (date)
  • nautilus-dropbox (date/SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • pencil (date)
  • perl (Time::Local FTBFS in 2020)
  • python-bjoern (sort, readdir(2))
  • uisp (date/SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • uperf (merged, date/SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • wyrd (date/SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #893314 filed against inkscape (sent upstream).

Weekly QA work

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

• Adrian Bunk (168)
• Emmanuel Bourg (2)
• Pirate Praveen (1)
• Tiago Stürmer Daitx (1)

Misc.

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