Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #78

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 16 and Saturday October 22 2016:

Media coverage

• Chris Lamb presented at Software Freedom Kosovo on reproducible builds on Saturday 22nd October.

Upcoming events

• Jürgen Rose will be giving a talk on Enforcing reproducible builds with Eclipse Package Drone at EclipseCon Europe 2016 in Ludwigsburg, Germany on October 27th.

buildinfo.debian.net

In order to build packages reproducibly, you not only need identical sources but also some external definition of the environment used for a particular build. This definition includes the inputs and the outputs and, in the Debian case, are available in a $package_$architecture_$version.buildinfo file.

We anticipate the next dpkg upload to sid will create .buildinfo files by default. Whilst it’s clear that we also need to teach dak to deal with them (#763822) its not actually clear how to handle .buildinfo files after dak has processed them and how to make them available to the world.

To this end, Chris Lamb has started development on a proof-of-concept .buildinfo server to see what issues arise. Source

Reproducible work in other projects

• Ximin Luo submitted a patch to GCC as a prerequisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• #841274 filed against node-once by Chris Lamb.
• #841342 filed against zshdb by Chris Lamb.
• #841427 filed against unifdef by Chris Lamb.
• #841440 filed against rdp-alignment by Chris Lamb.
• #841497 filed against cf-python by Chris Lamb.
• #841694 filed against dvdauthor by Reiner Herrmann.
• #841698 filed against node-lodash by Chris Lamb.
• #841701 filed against libtext-charwidth-perl by Reiner Herrmann.
• #841702 filed against libapt-pkg-perl by Reiner Herrmann.
• #841703 filed against libio-pty-perl by Reiner Herrmann.
• #841707 filed against eximdoc4 by Chris Lamb.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

99 package reviews have been added, 3 have been updated and 6 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

6 issue types have been added:

• bin_sh_is_bash
• captures_build_arch
• captures_build_path_via_assert
• docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta_on_i386
• graphviz_nondeterminstic_output
• randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_scilab

Weekly QA work

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

• Chris Lamb (23)
• Daniel Reichelt (2)
• Lucas Nussbaum (1)
• Santiago Vila (18)

diffoscope development

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • tests/ppu: skip some PPU tests if ppudump is < 3.0.0
  • ppu: ignore decoding errors from ppudump while filtering the output
  • ppu: don’t do run a full ppudump while only looking for PPU file version
  • debian: bump debhelper compat level to 10, no changes needed.
• Michel Messerschmidt:
  • Add rudimentary support for OpenDocumentFormat files

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• h01ger increased the diskspace for reproducible content on Jenkins. Thanks to ProfitBricks.
• Valerie Young supplied a patch to make Python SQL interface more SQLite/PostgresSQL agnostic.
• lynxis worked hard to make LEDE and OpenWrt builds happen on two hosts.

Misc.

Our poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting is still running until Tuesday, October 25st; please reply as soon as possible.

We need a logo! Some ideas and requirements for a Reproducible Builds logo have been documented in the wiki. Contributions very welcome, even if simply by forwarding this information.

This week’s edition was written by Chris Lamb & Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.