Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #187

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

• Reproducible Builds were mentioned on the latest episode of the Late Night Linux podcast starting at 18:03 (direct link).

• Apache Maven are continuing their work on reproducible builds, documenting their progress on their corresponding Confluence page.

• Vagrant Cascadian automated uploading .buildinfo files from the Debian archive to the experimental buildinfo.debian.net service. Over 1,000 .buildinfo files are typically uploaded each day.

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted the montly openSUSE reproducible builds status with details on the remaining 58 major issues in 2565 openSUSE DVD packages with GCC, Python and OpenJDK being the most irksome cases.

• Holger Levsen posted to our mailing list that Reproducible Builds t-shirts are available to contributors. Please see the corresponding thread for more information.

• Chris Lamb requested that the “Deterministic compilation” Wikipedia page be renamed to Reproducible builds (via the “Technical move requests” mechanism) given that this is overwhelmingly the generally accepted term for this concept.

• 17 Debian package reviews were added, 5 were updated and 14 were removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Two new issue types were added this week by Chris Lamb (timestamp_added_by_gnuradio_grcc and paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge) and he also updated a number of others, including as well as adding references to various existing notes (1 & 2), merging a duplicate issue […], and adding a bug reference for a patch […].

• Holger Levsen updated our website project to add IPFS as a participant at our upcoming Paris Summit […] and replaced an instance of “Tor” with “Tor Project” […]. In addition, Chris Lamb added a number of missing dates to the Talks & Resources page […].

• diffoscope is our in-depth “diff-on-steroids” utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages. This week, version 106 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. He included contributions already covered in previous weeks as well as overriding the new Lintian’s public-upstream-key-in-native-package tag […] and temporarily disabling Depends: on Gnumeric and Procyon as they are RC buggy […].

• We have received more than 50 registrations for the upcoming Reproducible Builds summit in Paris between 11th—13th December 2018 and registrations are now closed. Again, very much looking forward to seeing you there.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • lirc (date, sort, uname -r, also submitted upstream)
  • tigervnc (use CMake timestamp)
  • plasma5-desktop (parallelism)
  • python-textX (drop non-deterministic files)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #914091 filed against googletest.
  • #914176 filed against cfitsio.
  • #914252 filed against gnuradio.
• Emmanuel Bourg:
  • #914278 filed against openjdk-11.

Test framework development

There were a number of updates to our Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org this week, including:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add support for calculating a PureOS package set. […]
• Eli Schwartz:
  • Provide an even-better explanation for a sed(1) command in the Archlinux support. […]
• Jelle van der Waa:
  • Set LANG/LC_ALL in build 1 in the Archlinux support. […]
• Niko Tyni:
  • Fix the umask information on the “Variations tested” page. […]
• Simon McVittie:
  • Disable the merged /usr functionality in the base Debian tarball. […]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Explicitly also install GnuPG. […]
  • Perform some node maintenance. […]
  • reviewed, merged and deployed the above commits.

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