Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #91

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 15 and Saturday January 21 2017:

Media Coverage

• Valerie Young presented Reproducible Builds for a Better Future (video) at linux.conf.au 2017.

• Chris Lamb presented Reproducible Builds: Two years in the trenches (video) at linux.conf.au 2017.

Upcoming Events

• The Reproducible Build Zoo will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon, February 22nd.

• Dennis Gilmore and Holger Levsen will present on “Reproducible Builds and Fedora” at Devconf.cz on February 27th.

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

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

Toolchain development and fixes

Ximin Luo continued work on data formats, code, and test cases for SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP. He also continued to talk with the rustc team on the topic.

Chris Lamb submitted a patch to implement SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for wordwarvi, a game which gave extra points to people who built it from source within one hour. This fixes Debian #786593.

Launchpad bug 1657704 was filed for them to start accepting buildinfo files.

Bugs filed

• Chris Lamb:
  • #851809 filed against mono.
• Daniel Shahaf:
  • #851764 filed against hhsuite.

Reviews of unreproducible packages

10 package reviews have been added, 149 have been updated and 153 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

2 issue types have been updated:

• ftbfs_due_to_jenkins_semaphore_setup
• clilibs_line_order

Weekly QA work

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

• Chris Lamb (3)
• Ondřej Kobližek (1)

diffoscope development

diffoscope 69 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Maria Glukhova:
  • Bug fixes: #850055, #850501.
  • Improve comparison of APK files: #850502.
  • Add comparison of image metadata: #849395.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Many bug fixes: #849411, #850485, #850807, #850850, #851588.
  • Add comparison of ICO files: #850730.
  • Optimisations: disable profiling unless needed, and pre-compile regexes.
  • Many code quality improvements.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Deduplicate code for recognising file types based on RE_FILE_TYPE and RE_FILE_EXTENSION.
  • Improve code quality in tests.

Further development continued in Git, and will be released as version 70 next week:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add tests for --html-dir output and improve code quality elsewhere in tests.
  • Add markdown and reStructuredText output, as well as tests for these.
  • Improve software architecture of presenters.
  • Fix error-checking in the Haskell comparator.
• James Clarke:
  • Haskell comparator: properly extract version from interface files.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Improve some documentation.
• Brett Smith:
  • Improve documentation including --help output.

reproducible-builds.org website development

• Brett Smith:
  • berlin2016: List Conservancy consistently as a participant.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add Valerie’s talk to resources page.
• Daniel Shahaf:
  • Improved the “How to chair a meeting” section.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Holger added arm64 to https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/index_variations.html

• Mattia improved our process for building the performance page so that stats for new architectures are computed correctly without manual intervention.

• Holger enhanced the build node maintenance scripts to correctly detect if /dev/shm is mounted incorrectly (due to #851427) and deployed an /etc/rc.local startup script to all systems which works around it. As a result, jenkins_semaphore_setup_issue should be obsolete.

• Mattia improved the diskspace monitoring visible at our munin page for the 44 nodes we’re currently running.

• Holger added 6GB more RAM to jenkins.debian.net, for a total of 64GB RAM, to better cope with the new jobs due to `arm64. As usual, thanks to profitbricks.com for the hardware resources enabling this work.

Misc.

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