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Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #200

Published: Feb 26, 2019.


Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 17 and Saturday February 23 2019:

diffoscope development

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

This week, Chris Lamb made a huge a number of changes, including:

  • Add a --exclude-directory-metadata=recursive option to support ignoring timestamp (etc.) differences within nested containers. (Debian:#907600, #36).
  • Compare .asc PGP signatures as text, not as a hexdump. (Debian:#908991, #7).
  • Replace over 8 MB of Android boot ROM test suite fixtures with 14 KB equivalents to reduce the size of the release tarball. (#894334, reproducible-builds/diffoscope#13).
  • Additionally compare pgpdump(1) output when comparing PGP signatures. []
  • --help output improvements:
    • Include links to the diffoscope homepage and bug tracker. []
    • Indent and wrap the list of supported file formats. []
    • Refer to the Debian package names when indicating how to obtain the tlsh and argcomplete Python modules.. []
  • Adopt the Black code formatter:
    • Run against the existing source code. [].
    • Add an initial black setup in a PEP 518 pyproject.toml file [] and update MANIFEST.in to include it in future release tarballs. []
    • Add a test to ensure future source code satisfies the formatter. []
    • Allow GitLab CI failures in stable-bpo due to dependency on ‘black’.. []
  • Drop the DOS/MBR source string test. []
  • Rework and comment logic determining the fallback/default value for exclude_directory_metadata. []

Chris also uploaded version 112 to Debian unstable, dropped an errant </ul> from the diffoscope.org website [] and also applied the “black” code formatter to the try.diffoscope.org client [].

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

Test framework development

We operate a comprehensive Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. This week, Holger Levsen made a huge number of improvements including:


This week’s edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, heinrich5991, Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.


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