Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #152

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday March 18 and Saturday March 24 2018:

• Tails (used by Edward Snowden, etc.) announced that their 3.6.1 release is reproducible again.

• Nicolas Vigier updated our website to correct the tool used to build Tor Browser.

• Chris Lamb presented on reproducible builds at LibrePlanet 2018 on Saturday 24th March.

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

• Chris Lamb migrated the trydiffoscope, presentations, buildinfo.debian.net, reproducible-utils, tasks and misc Git repositories repositories from Alioth to Salsa.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #893374 filed against preload.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • perl-File-Unpack (Race condition)
  • kvirc (SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • kvirc (Uses CMake’s TIMESTAMP)
  • swift-im (Sort readdir(3))
  • wsmancli (Date)
  • scummvm-tools (Drop PNG timestamps)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #893504 filed against javatools (fixed).
  • #893611 filed against rpyc.

diffoscope development

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This week, version 92 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions already covered by posts in previous weeks as well as new ones from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • New features:
    • Add support for comparing Gnumeric spreadsheets. (Closes: #893311)
    • Show the list of supported file types in the manual and --help output. Thanks to Jonathan Dowland for the suggestion. (Closes: #893443)
  • Bug fixes:
    • Update Java tests for openjdk-9. (Closes: #893183)
  • Misc:
    • Add explicit runtime dependency on python3-distutils as it was dropped in Python 3.6.5~rc1-2.
    • Use our bin/diffoscope wrapper in manpage generation to ensure we are using the local version of diffoscope.
    • Clarify in the package description that that the Reproducible Builds project is not just about Debian.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add the word “ignore” to the --exclude-directory-metadata help text. (Closes: #893324)
• Paul Wise:
  • Add “more” ignore terminalogy to the documentation for exclusion options.

reprotest development

reprotest is our tool to build software and check it for reproducibility.

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add a bin/reprotest to match diffoscope and use it in our manpage generation.
  • Drop executable bit on doc/Makefile
  • Add Holger to Uploaders to avoid spurious “NMU” Lintian warnings.

trydiffoscope development

trydiffoscope is a lightweight command-line tool to the try.diffoscope.org web-based version of diffoscope.

• Chris Lamb:
  • Bump debhelper “compat” level to 11.
  • Add python3-distutils to Build-Depends.
  • Update Git URLs after moving the repository to salsa.debian.org.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

88 package reviews have been added, 109 have been updated and 18 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

A random_order_in_javahelper_manifest_files toolchain issue was added by Chris Lamb and the timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_inkscape toolchain issue was also updated with a URI to the upstream discussion.

Weekly QA work

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

• Adrian Bunk (66)
• Jeremy Bicha (1)
• Michael Olbrich (1)
• Ole Streicher (1)
• Sebastien KALT (1)
• Thorsten Glaser (1)

Misc.

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