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Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #197

Published: Feb 5, 2019.

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 27th and Saturday February 2nd 2019:

  • There was yet more progress towards making the Debian Installer images reproducible. Following-on from last week, Chris Lamb performed some further testing of the generated images resulting in two patches to ensure that builds were reproducible regardless of both the user’s umask(2) (filed as #920631) and even the underlying ordering of files on disk (#920676). It is hoped these can be merged for the next Debian Installer alpha/beta after the recent “Alpha 5” release.

  • Tails, the privacy-oriented “live” operating system released its first USB image, which is reproducible.

  • Chris Lamb implemented a check in the Lintian static analysis tool that performs automated checks against Debian packages in order to add a check for .sass-cache directories. As as they contain non-deterministic subdirectories they immediately contribute towards an unreproducible build (#920593).

  • disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into filesystems for easy and reliable testing. Chris Lamb fixed an issue this week in the handling of the fsyncdir system call to ensure dpkg(1) can “flush” /var/lib/dpkg correctly […].

  • Hervé Boutemy made more updates to the reproducible-builds.org project website, including documenting mvn.build-root […]. In addition, Chris Smith fixed a typo on the tools page […] and Holger Levsen added a link to Lukas’s report to the recent Paris Summit page […].

  • strip-nondeterminism is our tool that post-processes files to remove known non-deterministic output) version. This week, Chris Lamb investigated an issue regarding the tool not normalising file ownerships in .epub files that was originally identified by Holger Levsen, as well as clarified the negative message in test failures […] and performed some code cleanups (eg. […]).

  • Chris Lamb updated the SSL certificate for try.diffoscope.org to ensure validation after the deprecation of TLS-SNI-01 validation in LetsEncrypt.

  • Reproducible Builds were present at FOSDEM 2019 handing out t-shirts to contributors. Thank you!

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

  • 6 Debian package reviews were added, 3 were updated and 5 were removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb unearthed a new toolchain issue randomness_in_documentation_underscore_downloads_generated_by_sphinx, .

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 large number of improvements including:

  • Arch Linux-specific changes:
    • The scheduler is now run every 4h so present stats for this time period. […]
    • Fix detection of bad builds. […]
  • LEDE/OpenWrt-specific changes:
    • Make OpenSSH usable with a TCP port other than 22. This is needed for our OSUOSL nodes. […]
    • Perform a minor refactoring of the build script. […]
  • NetBSD-specific changes:
    • Add a ~jenkins/.ssh/config to fix jobs regarding OpenSSH running on non-standard ports. […]
    • Add a note that osuosl171 is constantly online. […]
  • Misc/generic changes:
    • Use same configuration for df_inode as for df to reduce noise. […]
    • Remove a now-bogus warning; we have its parallel in Git now. […]
    • Define ControlMaster and ControlPath in our OpenSSH configurations. […]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo and Vagrant Cascadian performed maintenance of the build nodes. ([…], […], […], etc.)

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

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