Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #24

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week:

Toolchain fixes

• Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper/9.20151004 which exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when running dh_auto_* (patch by Dhole). dh now also calls dh_strip_nondeterminism during build (patch by Andrew Ayer). The only remaining change regarding reproducibility in the custom debhelper is related to mtimes in data.tar which might be fixed directly in dpkg instead.
• Niels Thykier made another upload of debhelper/9.20151005 the next day to sort Build IDs added by dh_strip in control files.

Scott Kitterman fixed an issue with non-deterministic Depends generated by dh- python identified by Santiago Vila and Chris Lamb.

Lunar updated the patch against dpkg which makes the order of files in control.tar.gz deterministic using the new --sort=name option available in GNU Tar 1.28.

josch released sbuild version 0.66.0-1 with several fixes and improvements. The most notable one for reproducible builds is the new --build-path option and $build_path configuration variable added by akira which allows to explicitly chose a given build path.

Reiner Herrmann wrote a new patch for dh- systemd to sort the list of unit files in the generated maintainer scripts.

Packages fixed

The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aoeui, apron, camlmix, cudf, findlib, glpk- java, hawtjni, haxe, java-atk- wrapper, llvm- py, misery, mtasc, ocamldsort, optcomp, spamoracle.

The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• classified-ads/0.08-1 uploaded by Antti Järvinen, fix merged upstream, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• criu/1.7-3 uploaded by Salvatore Bonaccorso, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• doomsday/1.15.4-1 by Michael Gilbert.
• ejabberd/15.07-1~exp1 by Philipp Huebner.
• libxbean-java/4.4-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• markdown/1.0.1-8 uploaded by Matt Kraai, original patches by Chris Lamb (#776925) and akira (#793701).
• nedit/1:5.6a-3 by Paul Gevers.
• nvidia-settings/340.93-1 uploaded by Andreas Beckmann, original patch by Lunar.
• ocaml/4.02.3-2 by Stéphane Glondu.
• polygen/1.0.6.ds2-14 uploaded by Mehdi Dogguy, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• stsci.distutils/0.3.7-4 by Aurelien Jarno.
• vdr/2.2.0-4 by Tobias Grimm.
• vdr-plugin-xineliboutput/1.1.0+cvs20150907-3 by Tobias Grimm.
• w3c-markup-validator/1.3+dfsg-3 by Santiago Vila.
• xcolorsel/1.1a-19 by Santiago Vila.
• xmoto/0.5.11+dfsg-3 by Stephen Kitt.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• ognl/2.7.3-6 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• enblend-enfuse/4.1.4+dfsg-2 by Andreas Metzler.

Untested

• nvidia-xconfig/340.93-1 by Andreas Beckmann.
• nvidia-settings-legacy-304xx/304.128-1 by Andreas Beckmann.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #801212 on unicode-data by Esa Peuha: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.

reproducible.debian.net

ProfitBricks once again increased their support for reproducible builds in Debian and in other free software projects by adding 58 new cores and 138 GiB of RAM to the already existing setup. Two new amd64 build nodes and 16 new amd64 build jobs have been added which doubles the build capacity per day and allows us to spot many kind of problems earlier. The size of the tmpfs where builds are performed has also been increased from 70 to 200 GiB on all amd64 build nodes. Huge thanks!

When examining a package, a link now points to a table listing all previous recorded tests for the same package. (Mattia) The menu on the package pages has also been improved. (h01ger)

Packages in the depwait state are now rescheduled automatically after five days. (h01ger)

Links to documentation and other projects being tested have been made more visible on the landing page. (h01ger)

To reduce noise on the team IRC channel five different types of notifications have been turned into mail notifications. The remaining ones have been shortened and the status changes have been limited to unstable and experimental. (h01ger)

Maintainer notifications about status changes in a package will only be sent out once per day, and not on each status change. (h01ger)

diffoscope development

Some more experiments of concurrent processing have been made. None were good and reliable enough to be shared, though.

Package reviews

48 reviews have been removed, 189 added and 23 updated this week.

9 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb.

Misc.

h01ger met with Levente Polyak to discuss testing Arch Linux on Debian continuous test system with an easily extensible framework. The idea is to also allow testing of other distributions, and provide a nice package based view like the one for Debian.