Search Results: "Vincent Cheng"

15 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 59 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 5th and June 11th 2016: Media coverage Ed Maste gave a talk at BSDCan 2016 on reproducible builds (slides, video). GSoC and Outreachy updates Weekly reports by our participants: Documentation update - Ximin Luo proposed a modification to our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH spec explaining FORCE_SOURCE_DATE. Some upstream build tools (e.g. TeX, see below) have expressed a desire to control which cases of embedded timestamps should obey SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. They were not convinced by our arguments on why this is a bad idea, so we agreed on an environment variable FORCE_SOURCE_DATE for them to implement their desired behaviour - named generically, so that at least we can set it centrally. For more details, see the text just linked. However, we strongly urge most build tools not to use this, and instead obey SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH unconditionally in all cases. Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 16 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: apertium-dan-nor apertium-swe-nor asterisk-prompt-fr-armelle blktrace canl-c code-saturne coinor-symphony dsc-statistics frobby libphp-jpgraph paje.app proxycheck pybit spip tircd xbs The following 5 packages are new in Debian and appear to be reproducible so far: golang-github-bowery-prompt golang-github-pkg-errors golang-gopkg-dancannon-gorethink.v2 libtask-kensho-perl sspace The following packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again after being fixed: The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 68 reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 28 have been removed in this week. New and updated issues: 26 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, 1 by Santiago Vila and 1 by Sascha Steinbiss. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development disorderfs development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Steven Chamberlain submitted a patch to FreeBSD's makefs to allow reproducible builds of the kfreebsd installer. Ed Maste committed a patch to FreeBSD's binutils to enable determinstic archives by default in GNU ar. Helmut Grohne experimented with cross+native reproductions of dash with some success, using rebootstrap. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

8 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 58 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 29th and June 4th 2016: Media coverage Ed Maste will present Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD at BDSCan 2016 in Ottawa, Canada on June 11th. GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: angband blktrace code-saturne coinor-symphony device-tree-compiler mpich rtslib ruby-bcrypt ruby-bson-ext ruby-byebug ruby-cairo ruby-charlock-holmes ruby-curb ruby-dataobjects-sqlite3 ruby-escape-utils ruby-ferret ruby-ffi ruby-fusefs ruby-github-markdown ruby-god ruby-gsl ruby-hdfeos5 ruby-hiredis ruby-hitimes ruby-hpricot ruby-kgio ruby-lapack ruby-ldap ruby-libvirt ruby-libxml ruby-msgpack ruby-ncurses ruby-nfc ruby-nio4r ruby-nokogiri ruby-odbc ruby-oj ruby-ox ruby-raindrops ruby-rdiscount ruby-redcarpet ruby-redcloth ruby-rinku ruby-rjb ruby-rmagick ruby-rugged ruby-sdl ruby-serialport ruby-sqlite3 ruby-unicode ruby-yajl ruby-zoom thin The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads with an unknown result because they fail to build: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 45 reviews have been added, 25 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week. 12 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development Mattia uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.018-1 which improved support for *.epub files. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Last week we also learned about progress of reproducible builds in FreeBSD. Ed Maste announced a change to record the build timestamp during ports building, which is required for later reproduction. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrman, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

30 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 57 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 22nd and May 28th 2016: Media coverage Documentation update Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 18 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: canl-c configshell dbus-java dune-common frobby frown installation-guide jexcelapi libjsyntaxpane-java malaga octave-ocs paje.app pd-boids pfstools r-cran-rniftilib scscp-imcce snort vim-addon-manager The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 123 reviews have been added, 57 have been updated and 135 have been removed in this week. 21 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Santiago Vila. strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

7 April 2016

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Entering the Debian NM process


This week I've entered the Debian NM process to move from Debian Maintainer (DM) to Debian Developer (DD).

But, what have I been doing for Debian lastly?

I've been DM for the last year, after a couple of years maintaining packages with sponsors.

Since 2015 until this time of the 2016 year, I've done roughly 33 package uploads, opened 67 bugs and contributed to many others. I maintain and co-maintain now 9 packages, most of them Netfilter-related.

This is a graph of bugs assigned to my packages in the last natural year:


I was supported to start the process by Anibal Monsalve, and Vincent Cheng intermediately become by advocate.

The duration of the NM process can vary depending on a number of factors, from a couple of months to a couple of years.

BTW, I got my opened bug statistics with this small script: deb_bugs_years.sh

3 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 14 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes akira submitted a patch to make cdbs export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. She uploded a package with the enhancement to the experimental reproducible repository. Packages fixed The following 15 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dracut, editorconfig-core, elasticsearch, fish, libftdi1, liblouisxml, mk-configure, nanoc, octave-bim, octave-data-smoothing, octave-financial, octave-ga, octave-missing-functions, octave-secs1d, octave-splines, valgrind. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: In contrib, Dmitry Smirnov improved libdvd-pkg with 1.3.99-1-1. Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Four armhf build hosts were provided by Vagrant Cascadian and have been configured to be used by jenkins.debian.net. Work on including armhf builds in the reproducible.debian.net webpages has begun. So far the repository comparison page just shows us which armhf binary packages are currently missing in our repo. (h01ger) The scheduler has been changed to re-schedule more packages from stretch than sid, as the gcc5 transition has started This mostly affects build log age. (h01ger) A new depwait status has been introduced for packages which can't be built because of missing build dependencies. (Mattia Rizzolo) debbindiff development Finally, on August 31st, Lunar released debbindiff 27 containing a complete overhaul of the code for the comparison stage. The new architecture is more versatile and extensible while minimizing code duplication. libarchive is now used to handle cpio archives and iso9660 images through the newly packaged python-libarchive-c. This should also help support a couple other archive formats in the future. Symlinks and devices are now properly compared. Text files are compared as Unicode after being decoded, and encoding differences are reported. Support for Sqlite3 and Mono/.NET executables has been added. Thanks to Valentin Lorentz, the test suite should now run on more systems. A small defiency in unquashfs has been identified in the process. A long standing optimization is now performed on Debian package: based on the content of the md5sums control file, we skip comparing files with matching hashes. This makes debbindiff usable on packages with many files. Fuzzy-matching is now performed for files in the same container (like a tarball) to handle renames. Also, for Debian .changes, listed files are now compared without looking the embedded version number. This makes debbindiff a lot more useful when comparing different versions of the same package. Based on the rearchitecturing work has been done to allow parallel processing. The branch now seems to work most of the time. More test needs to be done before it can be merged. The current fuzzy-matching algorithm, ssdeep, has showed disappointing results. One important use case is being able to properly compare debug symbols. Their path is made using the Build ID. As this identifier is made with a checksum of the binary content, finding things like CPP macros is much easier when a diff of the debug symbols is available. Good news is that TLSH, another fuzzy-matching algorithm, has been tested with much better results. A package is waiting in NEW and the code is ready for it to become available. A follow-up release 28 was made on August 2nd fixing content label used for gzip2, bzip2 and xz files and an error on text files only differing in their encoding. It also contains a small code improvement on how comments on Difference object are handled. This is the last release name debbindiff. A new name has been chosen to better reflect that it is not a Debian specific tool. Stay tuned! Documentation update Valentin Lorentz updated the patch submission template to suggest to write the kind of issue in the bug subject. Small progress have been made on the Reproducible Builds HOWTO while preparing the related CCCamp15 talk. Package reviews 235 obsolete reviews have been removed, 47 added and 113 updated this week. 42 reports for packages failing to build from source have been made by Chris West (Faux). New issue added this week: haskell_devscripts_locale_substvars. Misc. Valentin Lorentz wrote a script to report packages tested as unreproducible installed on a system. We encourage everyone to run it on their systems and give feedback!

7 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 10 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Daniel Stender published an English translation of the article which originally appeared in Linux Magazin in Admin Magazine. Toolchain fixes Fixes landed in the Debian archive: Lunar submitted to Debian the patch already sent upstream adding a --clamp-mtime option to tar. Patches have been submitted to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to txt2man (Reiner Herrmann), epydoc (Reiner Herrmann), GCC (Dhole), and Doxygen (akira). Dhole uploaded a new experimental debhelper to the reproducible repository which exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. As part of the experiment, the patch also sets TZ to UTC which should help with most timezone issues. It might still be problematic for some packages which would change their settings based on this. Mattia Rizzolo sent upstream a patch originally written by Lunar to make the generate-id() function be deterministic in libxslt. While that patch was quickly rejected by upstream, Andrew Ayer came up with a much better one which sadly could have some performance impact. Daniel Veillard replied with another patch that should be deterministic in most cases without needing extra data structures. It's impact is currently being investigated by retesting packages on reproducible.debian.net. akira added a new option to sbuild for configuring the path in which packages are built. This will be needed for the srebuild script. Niko Tyni asked Perl upstream about it using the __DATE__ and __TIME__ C processor macros. Packages fixed The following 143 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alot, argvalidate, astroquery, blender, bpython, brian, calibre, cfourcc, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cloc, configshell, daisy-player, dipy, dnsruby, dput-ng, dsc-statistics, eliom, emacspeak, freeipmi, geant321, gpick, grapefruit, heat-cfntools, imagetooth, jansson, jmapviewer, lava-tool, libhtml-lint-perl, libtime-y2038-perl, lift, lua-ldoc, luarocks, mailman-api, matroxset, maven-hpi-plugin, mknbi, mpi4py, mpmath, msnlib, munkres, musicbrainzngs, nova, pecomato, pgrouting, pngcheck, powerline, profitbricks-client, pyepr, pylibssh2, pylogsparser, pystemmer, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-crypto, python-darts.lib.utils.lru, python-demgengeo, python-graph, python-mock, python-musicbrainz2, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what-plugins, python-repoze.what, python-repoze.who-plugins, python-xstatic-term.js, reclass, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-ipaddress, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, ryu, simplejson, spamassassin-heatu, speaklater, stompserver, syncevolution, syncmaildir, thin, ticgit, tox, transmissionrpc, vdr-plugin-xine, waitress, whereami, xlsx2csv, zathura. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set for the X Strike Force has been added. (h01ger) Bugs tagged with locale are now visible in the statistics. (h01ger) Some work has been done add tests for NetBSD. (h01ger) Many changes by Mattia Rizzolo have been merged on the whole infrastructure: debbindiff development Version 26 has been released on June 28th fixing the comparison of files of unknown format. (Lunar) A missing dependency identified in python-rpm affecting debbindiff installation without recommended packages was promptly fixed by Michal iha . Lunar also started a massive code rearchitecture to enhance code reuse and enable new features. Nothing visible yet, though. Documentation update josch and Mattia Rizzolo documented how to reschedule packages from Alioth. Package reviews 142 obsolete reviews have been removed, 344 added and 107 updated this week. Chris West (Faux) filled 13 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources. The following new issues have been added: snapshot_placeholder_replaced_with_timestamp_in_pom_properties, different_encoding, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib.

23 February 2014

Vincent Cheng: Hello, Planet Debian! (also, RFH: sponsorship-requests)

Hi Debian! Just to briefly introduce myself, I'm Vincent (vcheng@d.o, vincent_c on OFTC/Freenode) and I'm a recent graduate of the NM process, having attained DD-ship (is that even a word?) about a month ago in January. Before that, I was a DM since mid-2012, and just another contributor for a few years prior to that. Most of my contributions to the Project are related to packaging, especially packages maintained within the Debian Games Team. Outside of Debian, well, I'm just another 20-year-old, 3rd-year undergrad student studying at the University of British Columbia, working towards a major in computer science. I anticipate that I'll be able to ditch academia for good in 2016; just 2 more years to go... More about my life story in my AM's report. It's fairly boring, if I say so myself. This blog post isn't just about me; I'd like to touch upon another topic that I consider important, i.e. attracting new contributors, and in many cases that involves package sponsorship. That's one of the many things I'd like to work on as a DD, and to that effect I've dedicated a large chunk of the time I currently spend on Debian sponsoring various packages, including packages that I'm not familiar with. I would love to see the sponsorship-requests queue empty one day, but I admit that I find that increasingly unlikely to happen, now that I've gotten a taste of the time commitment involved with sponsoring. Team maintenance and sponsorship seems to work relatively well in Debian; why does that success not translate over to sponsorship-requests / debian-mentors@l.d.o, where a considerable amount of RFS requests don't see any response at all, and merely get closed once those packages get removed from mentors.debian.net (AFAIK they automatically get removed after 20 weeks)? Well, I'm not here to offer an answer for that, but I will point out that there was a relevant thread that originated on debian-devel a month ago: <87ha8lzl7n.fsf@inf-8660.int-evry.fr> (and no, I'm not talking about the giant init-related threads that pop up on debian-devel every other week or so and drown out everything else on the list...). Are DDs in general reluctant to engage in "fly-by sponsoring"? Most packages coming through the sponsorship-requests queue are not team-maintained, and are sent from sponsorees who are not already in contact with a sponsor, and who have no other way of getting in touch with a potential sponsor (assuming that there isn't an existing team or a DD who happens to be interested in that package). Regardless of the merits of fly-by sponsoring (many arguments in favour of, and against, this type of sponsorship have already been discussed in that thread; no need to re-iterate them here), it's discouraging for potential contributors new to Debian, who may just give up and move on to something else. I've now had the opportunity to be a sponsor (rather than just a sponsoree), and I acknowledge that being a sponsor is more work than I imagined it to be a month ago, and it can be quite tedious and not-fun at times. I suppose I can draw a parallel between sponsoring packages and RC bug fixing; neither is what I'd consider to be a highly enjoyable way of spending my leisure time, and both can eat up a large chunk of time and effort; both often involve working on something that you aren't familiar with. But both are beneficial to Debian. No, beneficial isn't a strong enough word; how about "essential" instead? Yeah, that makes more sense. Without dedicated RC bug squashers, Debian would never be able to make a release; without dedicated sponsors, the size of Debian's archive would be smaller and of lesser quality, and its community also a lot smaller. With all that said...I hope this blog post inspires at least a few DDs, possibly more, to dedicate a little bit more of their time towards sponsoring packages. :)