Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #96

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 19 and Saturday February 25 2017:

Reproducible work in other projects

• Christos Zaulas wrote a blog post entitled “NetBSD fully reproducible builds” which generated some discussion on Hacker News and was mentioned on DistroWatch.

• Christos also reported that that NetBSD’s base system is now 100.0% reproducible in our current test framework. Whilst we do less variations than in Debian here, this is highly commendable.

• Microsoft requires reproducible binaries for signing shim code for secure boot.

• Thanks to Ed Maste, FreeBSD base system reached 99.6% too, after he’d seen the news about NetBSD. This too has been achieved using non-default settings and is to be considered merely as a “hey we can do that too” (though Ed is slightly sad they missed 100%). The real plan is still to achieve 100% reproducibility with default settings.

Upcoming Events

Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th.

On March 23rd Holger Levsen will give a talk at the German Unix User Group’s “Frühjahrsfachgespräch” about Reproducible Builds everywhere.

Verifying Software Freedom with Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Libreplanet2017 in Boston, March 25th-26th.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

Chris Lamb:

• #855674 filed against sugar-physics-activity.
• #855909 filed against publicsuffix.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

9 package reviews have been added, 3 have been updated and 1 has been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Weekly QA work

During our reproducibility testing, the following FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (4)

diffoscope development

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.

• diffoscope 77 was unblocked by the release team for stretch.
• Mattia Rizzolo uploaded 77~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports.

buildinfo.debian.net development

buildinfo.debian.net is our experiment into how to process, store and distribute .buildinfo files after the Debian archive software has processed them.

• Chris Lamb:
  • Drop orphaned binary package instances.
  • Install to /usr/share with dh-virtualenv 1.0
  • Drop Installed-Build-Depends to recover diskspace.

Website development

• Holger Levsen:
  • Add link to https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_fully_reproducible_builds

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Ed Maste made the upcoming FreeBSD release almost 100% reproducible (see above).
• Holger Levsen added the number of configured and running builder jobs to the performance stats page.
• Holger Levsen improved the scheduler, so that untested packages and versions are tried sooner.
• Holger added logging for submitting .buildinfo files to `buildinfo.debian.net and added notification about this failure.
• Holger also made some minor improvements to the generated HTML.

Misc.

This week’s edition was written by Chris Lamb, Ed Maste & Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.