Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #128

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 1 and Saturday October 7 2017:

Media coverage

• Bernhard sent another report about the status of Reproducible openSUSE. They currently they are at 478 unreproducible and 11,111 reproducible packages out of 11,821, so also at 93%!

• Holger attempted to get a Reproducible Builds devroom at FOSDEM 2018 but sadly this proposal was not accepted.

Documentation updates

• Christoph Berg created a wiki page about Openjade generated timestamps from DSSSL stylesheets.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • LiE uninitialized memory (need to find upstream)
  • chrony date (merged)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #877375 filed against polygen.
  • #877381 filed against plr.
  • #877384 filed against rcs.
  • #877928 filed against cadvisor.
• jathan:
  • #877470 filed against bsh.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

32 package reviews have been added, 46 have been updated and 62 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Weekly QA work

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

• Adrian Bunk (27)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Don’t crash on malformed md5sums files. (Closes: #877473)
  • Improve names in output of “internal” binwalk members. (Closes: #877525)
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Fix test compatibility with dtb version 1.4.5

strip-nondeterminism development

Rob Browning noticed that strip-nondeterminism was causing serious performance regressions in the Clojure programming language within Debian. After some discussion, Chris Lamb also posted a query to debian-devel in case there were any other programming languages that might be suffering from the same problem.

• Chris Lamb:
  • jar.pm: Clojure considers the .class file to be stale if it shares the same timestamp of the .clj. We thus adjust the timestamps of the .clj to always be younger.. (Closes: #877418)
  • jar.pm, zip.pm: Allow $options{member_normalizer} callback to support specifying the timestamp.
  • zip.pm: Ensure that we don’t try and write an old timestamp; Archive::Zip will do this anyway, just noisily.
  • zip.pm: Calculate the target canonical time in just one place.
  • bin/strip-nondeterminism: Print a warning in –verbose mode if no canonical time specified.
  • jar.pm: Update comment to reflect that NTFS/FAT has a 2s timestamp granularity.
  • jar.pm: s/NTFS/FAT/. Thanks to James Ross.

reprotest development

Versions 0.7.1 and 0.7.2 were uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo:

• New features:
  • Add a --auto-build option to try to determine which specific variations cause unreproducibility.
  • Add a --source-pattern option to restrict copying of source_root, and set this automatically in our presets.
• Usability improvements:
  • Improve error messages in some common scenarios.
    • Fiving a source_root or build_command that doesn’t exist
    • Using reprotest with default settings after not installing Recommends
  • Output hashes after a successful --auto-build.
  • Print a warning message if we reproduced successfully but didn’t vary everything.
• Fix varying both umask and user_group at the same time.
• Have dpkg-source extract to different build dir if varying the build-path.
• Pass --exclude-directory-metadata to diffoscope(1) by default as this is the majority use-case.
• Various bug fixes to get the basic dsc+schroot example working.

It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from:

• Ximin Luo:
  • main: Add a --env-build option for testing different env vars
  • Don’t output spurious warnings in tests
  • Add some more notes on the remaining variations
  • Fix the help text for virtual servers

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Re-deploy odxu4a after being reinstalled and renamed from odxu4.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Rename armhf host odxu4 to odxu4a

Misc.

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