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Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #199

Published: Feb 19, 2019.

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 10th and Saturday February 16th 2019:

  • strip-nondeterminism is our tool that post-processes files to remove known non-deterministic output. This week, Chris Lamb adjusted its behaviour to deduplicate hardlinks via stat(2) before processing to avoid issues when handling files in parallel; as the per-filetype handlers are yet currently guaranteed to be atomic, one process could temporarily truncate a file which can cause errors in other processes operating on the “same” file under a different pathname. This was thus causing package build failures in packages that de-duplicate hardlinks in their build process such as the Debian Administrator’s Handbook (#922168).

  • There was a brief update from the Debian Ruby maintainers on whether the language might need to strip -fdebug-prefix-map from the tools used to build extensions.

  • On our mailing list, Holger Levsen re-raised a question regarding uploading the “official” .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.

  • On Tuesday 26th February Chris Lamb will speak at Speck&Tech 31 “Open Security” on Reproducible Builds in Trento, Italy.

  • Jelle van der Waa fixed some spelling mistakes on the reproducible-builds.org project website. […]

  • 6 Debian package reviews were added, 4 were updated and 16 were removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

diffoscope development

diffoscope is our in-depth “diff-on-steroids” utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages. This week:

  • Chris Lamb:
    • Add support for comparing .crx Chrome browser extensions. (#41)
    • Add support for comparing MP3 and files with similar metadata. (#43)
    • Replace the literal xxd(1) output (!)(!) in tests/data/hello.wasm with its binary equivalent (#47) and ensure both WebAssembly test data files are actually unique. (#42)
    • Catch tracebacks when mounting invalid filesystem images under guestfs. […]
    • Fix tests when using Ghostscript 9.20 vs 9.26 for Debian stable and for stable with the security repositories enabled. […][…]
    • Temporarily drop ubuntu-devel from internal test matrix due to a linux-firmware package installation issue. […]
  • Ed Maste:
    • Include relocations in objdump disassembly. (#48)
  • Graham Christensen:
    • Clarify “no file-specific differences” message when we fallback to a binary diff. (!19)
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Make test_ps.test_text_diff pass with Ghostscript version 9.26. […]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix […] and went on to upload disorderfs […] and trydiffoscope […] too.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

Test framework development

We operate a comprehensive Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org.

  • Hans-Christoph Steiner:
    • Set the LANG and LC_ALL environment variables for F-Droid builds to workaround an unsolved issue in Java/Gradle. […][…]
    • Modernise some dependencies. […]
    • Node maintenance. […]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Increased the diskspace for the two OSU Open Source Lab Arch Linux build nodes from 50GB to 350GB.
    • Upgraded all 47 nodes running Debian to the newly-released Debian 9.8.
    • Fix the version checking for diffoscope in Arch Linux. […]
    • Install kernels as a separate step to ignore failures when installing/upgrading Debian backports’ kernels. […]
    • Fix a number of issues with our Munin diskspace plugin. […][…]
    • Correct grammar of Arch Linux IRC message. […]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:

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

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