Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #159

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 6 and Saturday May 12 2018:

• Ricardo Wurmus published a paper titled Reproducible bioinformatics pipelines with Guix which outlines using GNU Guix and reproducible builds in general as a “crucial foundation for computational experiments”.

• There will be two talks at the upcoming MiniDebConfHamburg regarding Reproducible Builds which are detailed on the event’s schedule.

• There was further discussion on our mailing list regarding the typeface and colour scheme, etc. of our logo.

• 22 package reviews updated and 36 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

  • trackballs (gzip(1) timestamp)
  • libtool (Hostname)
  • openSUSE/semantik (Drop .png timestamp)

• Chris Lamb:

  • The proposed change to make Inkscape’s PDF output reproducible was merged. This was originally filed in Debian as #893314.

• kpcyrd:

  • Filed an issue against the Rust programming language regarding the non-deterministic use of cmpq which is resulting in non-deterministic binaries, as well as started a discussion on path remapping by default for Rust’s package manager, Cargo.
  • scdoc: Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

diffoscope development

diffoscope is our in-depth “diff-on-steroids” utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages. This week, version 94 was uploaded to Debian unstable and PyPI by Chris Lamb. It included contributions already convered by posts in previous weeks as well as new ones from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Remove all __pycache__ directories to avoid a source-contains-empty-directory Lintian warning.
  • Bump Standards-Version to 4.1.4.

Mattia Rizzolo subsequently backported this version to stretch.

After the release of version 94, the development continued with the following contributions from Mattia Rizzolo:

• Fix handling of filenames with non-unicode characters (Bug #898022).
• Use bytes objects as much as possible to prevent possible encoding issues
• Fix a Git-related test failure on FreeBSD (Bug #872826).
• Don’t capture unused output from the subprocess module.

disorderfs development

Version 0.5.3-1 of disorderfs (our FUSE-based filesystem that introduces non-determinism) was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions already convered by posts in previous weeks as well as new ones from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Ensure readdir(2) returns consistent (and unique) inode numbers. (Closes: #898287)
  • Add build-essential to test dependencies for inode tests.
  • Move to debhelper compat level 11.
  • Bump Standards-Version to 4.1.4.

jenkins.debian.net development

Mattia Rizzolo made the following changes to our Jenkins-based testing framework, including:

• Expand the check for the wrong future date to additionally detect when we accidentally revert to the present.
• Match another dsa-check-running-kernel message.
• Remove schroot setup jobs and drop mention of schroot from maintenance job descriptions.

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.