Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #87

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 18 and Saturday December 24 2016:

Media coverage

100% Of The 289 Coreboot Images Are Now Built Reproducibly by Phoronix, with more details in German by Pro-Linux.de.

We have further reports on our Reproducible Builds World summit #2 in Berlin from Rok Garbas of NixOS as well as Clemens Lang of MacPorts

Debian infrastructure work

Dak now archives buildinfo files thanks to a patch from Chris Lamb. We also have mostly finalised a design of how they will be distributed by the Debian FTP mirror network which we will start implementing soon. This is great for the future of Debianb but unfortunately this also means that we won’t have .buildinfo files for Stretch as Debian will not rebuild its source packages and because these binary packages currently in the archive were mostly built with dpkg > 1.18.11.

reprepro/5.0.0-1 has added support for dealing with .buildinfo files that are included in .changes files. (Closes: #843402)

Reproducible work in other projects

The Chromium project is now working on making their build process (mostly) deterministic.

Their motivation is to save both “[money] (less hardware is required) and developer time (reduced latency by having less work to do on the TS and CI)”.

Unreproducible bugs filed

• Chris Lamb:
  • #848721 filed against apt.
  • #848866 filed against libcorelinux.
  • #849314 filed against node-gulp.
  • #849333 filed against faker.
• Dhole:
  • #848633 filed against sugar-toolkit-gtk3.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

39 package reviews have been added, 75 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

2 issue types have been updated:

• Updated captures_build_path
• Added nondeterministic_ordering_in_desktop_files_by_python_sugar3

Weekly QA work

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

• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (7)
• Lucas Nussbaum (4)

diffoscope development

diffoscope 66 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Emanuel Bronshtein:
  • Use ssh-keygen for comparing OpenSSH public keys
  • Use js-beautify as JavaScript code beautifier for .js files (with tests).
  • Many CSS & HTML improvements.
  • Change all HTTP URLs to HTTPS where applicable.
• anthraxx:
  • Enable the use of ssh-keygen on Arch Linux.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Add detection of order-only difference in plain text format. (Closes: #848049)
  • Change icc-recognizing regexp to reflect changes in file type description. (Closes: #848814)
• Chris Lamb:
  • Update tests for compatibility with enjarify >= 1.0.3. (Closes: #849142)
  • When skipping tests because the version of an external is too low, print the detected version.
  • Avoid unpacking packages twice when comparing .changes. (Closes: #843531)
  • Add a simple profiling framework (enabled via –profile).
  • Various code quality and reliability improvements.
  • Document how to sign PyPI uploads.

strip-nondeterminism development

strip-nondeterminism 0.029-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included no new content from this week, but rather included contributions from previous weeks.

reproducible-website development

The website is now also accessible via the https://www.reproducible-builds.org URL.

• Clemens Lang:
  • Add the definition of “reproducible”, as drafted at the reproducible builds world summit in Berlin. Thanks to all participants in the sessions that worked these out!
• Valerie R Young:
  • Force ordering of titles.
  • Various formatting improvements.
• Holger Levsen:
  • Various usability and formatting improvements.
  • https://www.reproducible-builds.org
• Chris Lamb:
  • Various usability, style and wording improvements.
  • Add Debconf15, Skroutz.gz and MiniDebconfCambridge15 talks to resources page.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• We changed the data storage backend from a single sqlite3 database file (651 MB) to a PostgreSQL database. With this change we’ll be able to scale a lot more and add testing of the arm64 architecture.
  • Valerie Young wrote most of the code, Mattia Rizzolo reviewed and helped improve the code and Holger deployed it and found some minor bugs which have been fixed.
• We are now testing the arm64 architecture for all packages on all suites, arranged by Holger. Many thanks to codethink for providing us with access to eight 8-core arm64 machines with 64GB memory, which allows us to rebuild Debian very fast!

Misc.

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