/usr-merge work, by Helmut Grohne, et al. Given that we now have consensus on moving forward by moving aliased files from / to /usr, we will also run into the problems that the file move moratorium was meant to prevent. The way forward is detecting them early and applying workarounds on a per-package basis. Said detection is now automated using the Debian Usr Merge Analysis Tool. As problems are reported to the bug tracking system, they are connected to the reports if properly usertagged. Bugs and patches for problem categories DEP17-P2 and DEP17-P6 have been filed. After consensus has been reached on the bootstrapping matters, debootstrap has been changed to swap the initial unpack and merging to avoid unpack errors due to pre-existing links. This is a precondition for having base-files install the aliasing symbolic links eventually. It was identified that the root filesystem used by the Debian installer is still unmerged and a change has been proposed. debhelper was changed to recognize systemd units installed to /usr. A discussion with the CTTE and release team on repealing the moratorium has been initiated.

Salsa CI work, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n August was a busy month in the Salsa CI world. Santiago reviewed and merged a bunch of MRs that have improved the project in different aspects: The aptly job got two MRs from Philip Hands. With the first one, the aptly now can export a couple of variables in a dotenv file, and with the second, it can include packages from multiple artifact directories. These MRs bring the base to improve how to test reverse dependencies with Salsa CI. Santiago is working on documenting this. As a result of the mass bug filing done in August, Salsa CI now includes a job to test how a package builds twice in a row. Thanks to the MRs of Sebastiaan Couwenberg and Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues. Last but not least, Santiago helped Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues to complete the support for arm64-only pipelines.

DebConf23 lead-up, by Stefano Rivera Stefano wears a few hats in the DebConf organization and in the lead up to the conference in mid-September, they ve all been quite busy. As one of the treasurers of DebConf 23, there has been a final budget update, and quite a few payments to coordinate from Debian s Trusted Organizations. We try to close the books from the previous conference at the next one, so a push was made to get DebConf 22 account statements out of TOs and record them in the conference ledger. As a website developer, we had a number of registration-related tasks, emailing attendees and trying to estimate numbers for food and accommodation. As a conference committee member, the job was mostly taking calls and helping the local team to make decisions on urgent issues. For example, getting conference visas issued to attendees required getting political approval from the Indian government. We only discovered the full process for this too late to clear some complex cases, so this required some hard calls on skipping some countries from the application list, allowing everyone else to get visas in time. Unfortunate, but necessary.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Rapha l Hertzog updated gnome-shell-extension-hamster to a new upstream git snapshot that is compatible with GNOME Shell 44 that was recently uploaded to Debian unstable/testing. This extension makes it easy to start/stop tracking time with Hamster Time Tracker. Very handy for consultants like us who are billing their work per hour.
• Rapha l also updated zim to the latest upstream release (0.74.2). This is a desktop wiki that can be very useful as a note-taking tool to build your own personal knowledge base or even to manage your personal todo lists.
• Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some uploads from mentors.debian.net.
• Utkarsh helped the local team and the bursary team with some more DebConf activities and helped finalize the data.
• Thorsten tried to update package hplip. Unfortunately upstream added some new compressed files that need to appear uncompressed in the package. Even though this sounded like an easy task, which seemed to be already implemented in the current debian/rules, the new type of files broke this implementation and made the package no longer buildable. The problem has been solved and the upload will happen soon.
• Helmut sent 7 patches for cross build failures. Since dpkg-buildflags now defaults to issue arm64-specific compiler flags, more care is needed to distinguish between build architecture flags and host architecture flags than previously.
• Stefano pushed the final bit of the tox 4 transition over the line in Debian, allowing dh-python and tox 4 to migrate to testing. We got caught up in a few unusual bugs in tox and the way we run it in Debian package building (which had to change with tox 4). This resulted in a couple of patches upstream.
• Stefano visited Haifa, Israel, to see the proposed DebConf 24 venue and meet with the local team. While the venue isn t committed yet, we have high hopes for it.

Debian LTS contributors In July, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 24.75h (out of 18.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period).
• Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 14.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 23.25h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
• Jochen Sprickerhof did 10.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 16.0h (out of 9.75h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 19.25h (out of 14.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 25.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 21.25h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 1.5h (out of 0h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 35 DLAs. LTS contributor Lee Garrett, has continued his hard work to prepare a testing framework for Samba, that can now provision bootable VMs with little effort, both for Debian and for Windows. This work included the introduction of a new package to Debian, rhsrvany, which allows turning any Windows program or script into a Windows service. As the Samba testing framework matures it will be possible to perform functional tests which cannot be performed with other available test mechanisms and aspects of this framework will be generalizable to other package ecosystems beyond Samba. July included a notable security update of bind9 by LTS contributor Chris Lamb. This update addressed a potential denial of service attack in this critical network infrastructure component.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 95 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 63 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 106 months)
  • Linode (for 100 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 89 months)
  • Plat Home (for 89 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 45 months)
  • Deveryware (for 32 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 27 months)
  • EDF SA (for 16 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 110 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 104 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 96 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 96 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 90 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 80 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 74 months)
  • CINECA (for 63 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 57 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 47 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 45 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 39 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 39 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 33 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 30 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 28 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 28 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 20 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 17 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 111 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 111 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 108 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 108 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 106 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 105 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 105 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 104 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 104 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 104 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 100 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 95 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 92 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 87 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 87 months)
  • Tesorion (for 87 months)
  • Bearstech (for 78 months)
  • LiHAS (for 78 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 73 months)
  • Supagro (for 68 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 67 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 53 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 45 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 42 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 37 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 32 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 29 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 24 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 23 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 22 months)
  • Alter Way (for 15 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 4 months)

tracker.debian.org work by Rapha l Hertzog Rapha l spent some time during his vacation to update distro-tracker to be fully compatible with Django 3.2 so that the codebase and the whole testsuite can run on Debian 12. There s one exception though with the functional test suite that still needs further work to cope with the latest version of Selenium. By dropping support of Django 2.2, Rapha l could also start to work toward support of Django 4.2 since Django helpfully emits deprecation warnings of things that will break in future versions. All the warnings have been fixed but the codebase still fails its testsuite in Django 4.2 because we have to get rid of the python3-django-jsonfield dependency (that is rightfully dead upstream since Django has native support nowadays). All the JSONField have been converted to use Django s native field, but the migration system still requires that dependency at this point. This will require either some fresh reboot of the migration history, or some other trickery to erase the jsonfield dependency from the history of migrations. If you have experience with that, don t hesitate to share it (mail at hertzog@debian.org, or reach out to buxy on IRC). At this point, tracker.debian.org runs with Django 3.2 on Debian 11 since Debian System Administrators are not yet ready to upgrade debian.org hosts to Debian 12.

DebConf 23 bursary work by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh led the bursary team this year. The bursary team got a ton of requests this time. Rolling out the results in 4 batches, the bursary team catered over 165 bursary requests - which is superb! The team managed to address all the requests and answered a bit over 120 emails in the process. With that, the bursaries are officially closed for DebConf 2023. The team also intends to roll out some of the statistics closer to DebConf.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano implemented meson support in pybuild, the tool for building Python packages in Debian against multiple Python versions.
• Santiago did some work on Salsa CI to enhance the ARM support on the autopkgtest job and make Josch s branch work. MR to come soon.
• Helmut sent patches for 6 cross build failures.
• Stefano has been preparing for DebConf 23: Working on the website, and assisting the local teams.
• Stefano attended the DebConf Video team sprint in Paris, mostly looking at new hardware and software options for video capture and live-mixing. Full sprint report.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
• Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
• Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 40 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included mariadb-10.3, openssl, and golang-go.crypto. The mariadb-10.3 package was synchronized with the latest upstream maintenance release, version 10.3.39. The openssl package was patched to correct several flaws with certificate validation and with object identifier parsing. Finally, the golang-go.crypto package was updated to address several vulnerabilities, and several associated Go packages were rebuilt in order to properly incorporate the update. LTS contributor Sylvain has been hard at work with some behind-the-scenes improvements to internal tooling and documentation. His efforts are helping to improve the efficiency of all LTS contributors and also helping to improve the quality of their work, making our LTS updates more timely and of higher quality. LTS contributor Lee Garrett began working on a testing framework specifically for Samba. Given the critical role which Samba plays in many deployments, the tremendous impact which regressions can have in those cases, and the unique testing requirements of Samba, this work will certainly result in increased confidence around our Samba updates for LTS. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun preparatory work for the upcoming Firefox ESR version 115 release. Firefox ESR (and the related Thunderbird ESR) requires special work to maintain up to date in LTS. Mozilla do not release individual patches for CVEs, and our policy is to incorporate new ESR releases from Mozilla into LTS. Most updates are minor updates, but once a year Mozilla will release a major update as they move to a new major version for ESR. The update to a new major ESR version entails many related updates to toolchain and other packages. The preparations that Emilio has begun will ensure that once the 115 ESR release is made, updated packages will be available in LTS with minimal delay. Another highlight of behind-the-scenes work is our Front Desk personnel. While we often focus on the work which results in published package updates, much work is also involved in reviewing new vulnerabilities and triaging them (i.e., determining if they affect one or more packages in LTS and then determining the severity of those which are applicable). These intrepid contributors (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Markus Koschany, Ola Lundqvist, Sylvain Beucler, and Thorsten Alteholz for the month of June) reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities and made decisions about how those vulnerabilities should be dealt with.

Thanks to our sponsors

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 94 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 62 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 105 months)
  • Linode (for 99 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 88 months)
  • Plat Home (for 88 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 44 months)
  • Deveryware (for 31 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 26 months)
  • EDF SA (for 15 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 109 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 103 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 95 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 95 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 89 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 79 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 73 months)
  • CINECA (for 62 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 56 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 46 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 44 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 38 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 38 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 32 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 29 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 27 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 27 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 18 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 16 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 110 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 110 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 107 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 107 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 105 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 104 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 104 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 103 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 103 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 103 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 99 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 94 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 91 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 86 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 86 months)
  • Tesorion (for 86 months)
  • Bearstech (for 77 months)
  • LiHAS (for 77 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 72 months)
  • Supagro (for 67 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 66 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 52 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 44 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 41 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 36 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 31 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 28 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 22 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 22 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 21 months)
  • Alter Way (for 14 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 3 months)

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al The work on /usr-merge continues from May. The lengthy discussion was condensed into a still lengthy rewrite of DEP17 listing all known problems and proposed mitigations. An initial consensus call did not resolve all questions, but we now have rough consensus on finalizing the transition without relying on major changes to dpkg. Other questions still have diverging opinions and some matters such as how to not break backports are still missing satisfying answers.

DebConf Bursary prep, by Utkarsh Gupta DebCamp and DebConf is happening from 03rd September to 17th September in Kochi, India, and the DebConf Bursary team is gearing up for that. After extending the bursary deadline (catering to the requests coming in from various people), we ve finally managed to clock over 260 bursary requests. The team is set up and we re starting to review the applications. The team intends to roll out the result as soon as possible.

debci, by Helmut Grohne As Freexian is working on deploying autopkgtests for the LTS and ELTS services, debci and autopkgtests were improved in Debian to better deal with derivatives (e.g. by better supporting external package signing keyrings). Other aspects that are not deployed on ci.debian.net such as the qemu backend were also improved. We express thanks to the relevant maintainers Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Simon McVittie for their timely reviews and merges of our changes.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Following the release of Debian 12, Rapha l Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to be aware of trixie. He also pushed some fixes to distro-tracker (the software powering tracker.debian.org) and released version 1.2.0 (since the former release was lacking fixes to run on Debian 12 bookworm).
• Following the release of Debian 12, Helmut Grohne updated crossqa.debian.net systems. He also sent 7 patches for cross build failures and continued adapting rebootstrap to changes in unstable.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n started to work on how to improve the robustness of Salsa CI s pipeline for some jobs failing frequently.
• Thorsten Alteholz did security updates of cpdb-libs in Unstable and Bookworm.
• Stefano Rivera upgraded pixelfed.debian.social to bookworm.
• Stefano started an re2 library transition, and started preparation for the next transition.
• Helmut Grohne updated debvm in unstable releasing changes that accumulated during the freeze.
• Stefano did some work on the website and infrastructure for DebConf 23.
• Utkarsh Gupta helped review and fix open redmine bugs and fix them all in unstable.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al Towards the end of April, the discussion on DEP 17 on debian-devel@l.d.o initiated by Helmut Grohne took off, trying to deal with the fact that while Debian bookworm has a merged /usr, files are still being distributed to / and /usr in Debian binary packages, and moving them currently has some risk of breakage. Most participants of the discussion agreed that files should be moved, and there are several competing design ideas for doing it safely. Most of the time was spent understanding the practical implications of lifting the moratorium and moving all the files from / to /usr in a coordinated effort. With help from Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Enrico Zini, and Raphael Hertzog, Helmut Grohne performed extensive analysis of the various aspects, including quantitative analysis of the original file move problem, analysis of effects on dpkg-divert, dpkg-statoverride, and update-alternatives, analysis of effects on filesystem bootstrapping tools. Most of the problematic cases spawned plausible workarounds, such as turning Breaks into Conflicts in selected cases or adding protective diversions for the symbolic links that enable aliasing. Towards the end of May, Andreas Beckmann reported a new failure scenario which may cause shared resources to inadvertently disappear, such as directories and even regular files in case of Multi-Arch packages, and our work on analyzing these problems and proposing mitigations is on-going. While the quantitative analysis is funded by Freexian, we wouldn t be here without the extensive feedback and ideas of many voluntary contributors from multiple areas of Debian, which are too many to name here. Thank you.

Preparing for the tox 4 transition, by Stefano Rivera While Debian was in freeze for the bookworm release, tox 4 has landed in Debian experimental, and some packages are starting to require it, upstream. It has some backwards-incompatible behavior that breaks many packages using tox through pybuild. So Stefano had to make some changes to pybuild and to many packages that run build-time tests with tox. The easy bits of this transition are now completed in git / experimental, but a few packages that integrate deeply into tox need upstream work.

Debian Printing, by Thorsten Alteholz Just before the release of Bookworm, lots of QA tools were used to inspect packages. One of these tools found a systemd service file in a wrong directory. So, Thorsten did another upload of package lprint to correct this. Thanks a lot to all the hardworking people who run such tools and file bugs. Thorsten also participated in discussions about the new Common Printing Dialog Backends (CPDB) that will be introduced in Trixie and hopefully can replace the current printing architecture in Forky.

Miscellaneous contributions

• DebConf 23 preparations by Stefano Rivera. Some work on the website, video team planning, accounting, and team documentation.
• Utkarsh Gupta started to prep the work on the bursary team s side for DC23.
• Stefano spun up a website for the Hamburg mini-DebConf so that the video team could have a machine-readable schedule and a place to stream video from the event.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n reviewed and sponsored four python packages of a prospective Debian member.
• Helmut Grohne supported Timo Roehling and Jochen Sprickerhof to improve cross building in 15 ROS packages.
• Helmut Grohne supported Jochen Sprickerhof with diagnosing an e2fsprogs RC bug.
• Helmut Grohne continued to maintain rebootstrap and located an issue with lto in gcc-13.
• Anton Gladky fixed some RC-Bugs and uploaded a new stravalib python library.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yeppy78q
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/28yt5wbg
• [3] https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2ztqaw9a
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2kv68veo
• [6] https://en.culturess.com/view/?id=santiago-genoves-experiment-cul
• [7] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59479.html
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yy8pyg65
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2qr9evgb
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2ngytzuh
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2qjffrt3
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2ote6mw7
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/yxe75yel
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/y23lbw2n

source=("git+https://github.com/vimeo/psalm.git#commit=$ _commit "
        "composer.lock")

 prepare()  
   cd $ pkgname 
   cp ../composer.lock .
 
updlockfiles()  
  cd $ pkgname 
  rm -f composer.lock
  composer update
  cp composer.lock "$ outdir /"
 

updlockfiles

Thanks This work is currently crowd-funded on github sponsors. I d like to thank @SantiagoTorres, @repi and @rgacogne for their support in particular.

Reproducible Builds summit 2022 Despite several delays, we are pleased to announce that registration is open for our in-person summit this year: November 1st November 3rd
The event will happen in Venice (Italy). We intend to pick a venue reachable via the train station and an international airport. However, the precise venue will depend on the number of attendees. Please see the announcement email for information about how to register.

Is reproducibility practical? Ludovic Court s published an informative blog post this month asking the important question: Is reproducibility practical?:

Our attention was recently caught by a nice slide deck on the methods and tools for reproducible research in the R programming language. Among those, the talk mentions Guix, stating that it is for professional, sensitive applications that require ultimate reproducibility , which is probably a bit overkill for Reproducible Research . While we were flattered to see Guix suggested as good tool for reproducibility, the very notion that there s a kind of reproducibility that is ultimate and, essentially, impractical, is something that left us wondering: What kind of reproducibility do scientists need, if not the ultimate kind? Is reproducibility practical at all, or is it more of a horizon?

The post goes on to outlines the concept of reproducibility, situating examples within the context of the GNU Guix operating system.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 218, 219 and 220 to Debian, as well as made the following changes:

• New features:
  • Support Haskell 9.x series files. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Fix a regression introduced in version 207 where diffoscope would crash if one directory contained a directory that wasn t in the other. Thanks to Alderico Gallo for the testcase. [ ]
  • Don t traceback if we encounter an invalid Unicode character in Haskell versioning headers. [ ]
• Output improvements:
  • Improve output of Markdown and reStructuredText to use code blocks with highlighting. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Space out a file a little. [ ]
  • Update various copyright years. [ ]

Mailing list On our mailing list this month:

• Roland Clobus posted his Eleventh status update about reproducible [Debian] live-build ISO images, noting amongst many other things! that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm and sid.
• Santiago Torres-Arias announced a Call for Papers (CfP) for a new SCORED conference, an academic workshop around software supply chain security . As Santiago highlights, this new conference invites reviewers from industry, open source, governement and academia to review the papers [and] I think that this is super important to tackle the supply chain security task .

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. This month, however, we submitted the following patches:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann
  • openSUSE monthly report
  • acarsdec (embeds CPU info with march=native)
  • casacore (embeds CPU info with march=native)
  • kubernetes (uses random name of temporary directory)
  • setuptools/python-brotlicffi (toolchain, filesys/readdir)
  • sysstat (FTBFS in single CPU mode)
  • sundials (FTBFS in single CPU mode)
  • nim (FTBFS in single CPU mode)
  • doxygen/libzypp (toolchain readdir)
  • python-pyquil (build failure)
  • openssl-1_0_0 (build failure)
  • jsonrpc-glib (FTBFS in single CPU mode)
  • slurm (Link-Time Optimisation and .tar issues)
  • wasi-libc (sort the output from find)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1015245 filed against libshumate.
  • #1015246 filed against zeal.
  • #1016186 filed against gappa.
• Philip Rinn:
  • #1014877 filed against cxref.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1014426 filed against cldump.
  • #1014428 filed against xmacro.
  • #1014559 filed against libloki.
  • #1014560 filed against ygl.
  • #1014561 filed against clp.
  • #1014564 filed against tvtime.
  • #1014789 filed against rdiff-backup-fs.

Reprotest reprotest is the Reproducible Builds project s end-user tool to build the same source code twice in widely and deliberate different environments, and checking whether the binaries produced by the builds have any differences. This month, the following changes were made:

• Holger Levsen:
  • Uploaded version 0.7.21 to Debian unstable as well as mark 0.7.22 development in the repository [ ].
  • Make diffoscope dependency unversioned as the required version is met even in Debian buster. [ ]
  • Revert an accidentally committed hunk. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Apply a patch from Nick Rosbrook to not force the tests to run only against Python 3.9. [ ]
  • Run the tests through pybuild in order to run them against all supported Python 3.x versions. [ ]
  • Fix a deprecation warning in the setup.cfg file. [ ]
  • Close a new Debian bug. [ ]

Reproducible builds website A number of changes were made to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including:

• Arnout Engelen:
  • Add a link to recent May Contain Hackers 2022 conference talk slides. [ ]
• Chris Lamb:
  • Correct some grammar. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add talk from FOSDEM 2015 presented by Holger and Lunar. [ ]
  • Show date of presentations if we have them. [ ][ ]
  • Add my presentation from DebConf22 [ ] and from Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 [ ].
  • Add dhole to the speakers of the DebConf15 talk. [ ]
  • Add raboof s talk Reproducible Builds for Trustworthy Binaries from May Contain Hackers. [ ]
  • Drop some Debian-related suggested ideas which are not really relevant anymore. [ ]
  • Add a link to list of packages with patches ready to be NMUed. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add information about our upcoming event in Venice. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Create graphs displaying existing .buildinfo files per each Debian suite/arch. [ ][ ]
  • Fix a typo in the Debian dashboard. [ ][ ]
  • Fix some issues in the pkg-r package set definition. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve the builtin-pho HTML output. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Temporarily disable all live builds as our snapshot mirror is offline. [ ]
• Automated node health checks:
  • Detect dpkg failures. [ ]
  • Detect files with bad UNIX permissions. [ ]
  • Relax a regular expression in order to detect Debian Live image build failures. [ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Test that FreeBSD virtual machine has been updated to version 13.1. [ ]
  • Add a reminder about powercycling the armhf-architecture mst0X node. [ ]
  • Fix a number of typos. [ ][ ]
  • Update documentation. [ ][ ]
  • Fix Munin monitoring configuration for some nodes. [ ]
  • Fix the static IP address for a node. [ ]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated host keys for the cbxi4pro0 and wbq0 nodes [ ] and, finally, node maintenance was also performed by Mattia Rizzolo [ ] and Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ].

Contact As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

source=("git+https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty.git#tag=v$ pkgver ?signed")
validpgpkeys=('4DAA67A9EA8B91FCC15B699C85CDAE3C164BA7B4'
              'A56EF308A9F1256C25ACA3807EA8F8B94622A6A9')
sha256sums=('SKIP')

• authentication: verify the git tag was signed by one of the two trusted keys.
• pinning: the source code is not pinned and git tags are not immutable, upstream could create a new signed git tag with an identical name and arbitrarily change the source code without the PKGBUILD noticing.

source=($pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz::https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/archive/refs/tags/v$pkgver.tar.gz)
sha256sums=('e48d4b10762c2707bb17fd8f89bd98f0dcccc450d223cade706fdd9cfaefb308')

• authentication: there s no signature, so this PKGBUILD doesn t cryptographically verify authorship.
• pinning: the source code is cryptographically pinned, it s addressing the source code by it s content. There s nothing upstream can do to silently change the code used by this PKGBUILD.

makedepends=('auth-tarball-from-git')
source=($pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz::https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/archive/refs/tags/v$pkgver.tar.gz
        chrisduerr.pgp
        kchibisov.pgp)
sha256sums=('e48d4b10762c2707bb17fd8f89bd98f0dcccc450d223cade706fdd9cfaefb308'
            '19573dc0ba7a2f003377dc49986867f749235ecb45fe15eb923a74b2ab421d74'
            '5b866e6cb791c58cba2e7fc60f647588699b08abc2ad6b18ba82470f0fd3db3b')
prepare()  
  cd "$pkgname-$pkgver"
  auth-tarball-from-git --keyring ../chrisduerr.pgp --keyring ../kchibisov.pgp \
    --tag v$pkgver --prefix $pkgname-$pkgver \
    https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty.git ../$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz
 

• authentication: auth-tarball-from-git verifies the signed git tag and then verifies the tarball has been built from the commit the tag is pointing to.
• pinning: the source code and the files containing the public keys are cryptographically pinned.

Thanks This work is currently crowd-funded on github sponsors. I d like to thank @SantiagoTorres, @repi and @rgacogne for their support in particular.

[ ] implemented what we call package multi-versioning for C/C++ software that lacks function multi-versioning and run-time dispatch [ ]. It is another way to ensure that users do not have to trade reproducibility for performance. (full PDF)

It is one thing to talk about reproducible builds and how they strengthen software supply chain security, but it s quite another to effectively configure a reproducible build. Concrete steps for specific languages are a far larger topic than can be covered in a single blog post, but today we ll be talking about some guiding principles when designing reproducible builds. [ ]

Events There will be an in-person Debian Reunion in Hamburg, Germany later this year, taking place from 23 30 May. Although this is a Debian event, there will be some folks from the broader Reproducible Builds community and, of course, everyone is welcome. Please see the event page on the Debian wiki for more information. Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted to our mailing list about a meetup for Reproducible Builds folks at the openSUSE conference in Nuremberg, Germany. It was also recently announced that DebConf22 will take place this year as an in-person conference in Prizren, Kosovo. The pre-conference meeting (or Debcamp ) will take place from 10 16 July, and the main talks, workshops, etc. will take place from 17 24 July.

Misc news Holger Levsen updated the Reproducible Builds website to improve the documentation for the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable, both by expanding parts of the existing text [ ][ ] as well as clarifying meaning by removing text in other places [ ]. In addition, Chris Lamb added a Twitter Card to our website s metadata too [ ][ ][ ]. On our mailing list this month:

• Early in the month, Mattia Rizzolo posted to our mailing list asking for early thoughts about running an in-person Reproducible Builds event later in 2022.
• Chris Lamb then posted to our mailing list with a call for real-world instances where reproducibility practices have flagged something legitimately bad . Although no public, concrete examples were cited, the resulting discussion was interesting and wide-ranging.
• Marc Haber also posted to our mailing list with an interesting problem where building Debian packages with libfaketime yields different results when run outside of libfaketime.

Distribution work In Debian this month:

• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues posted to the debian-devel list mentioning that he exploited the property of reproducibility within Debian to demonstrate that automatically converting a large number of packages to a new internal source version did not change the resulting packages. The proposed change could therefore be applied without causing breakage:

So now we have 364 source packages for which we have a patch and for which we can show that this patch does not change the build output. Do you agree that with those two properties, the advantages of the 3.0 (quilt) format are sufficient such that the change shall be implemented at least for those 364? [ ]

• 144 reviews of Debian packages were added, 241 were updated and 20 were removed this month, significantly adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too, including buildpath_in_postgres_opcodes, captures_kernel_version_via_CMAKE_SYSTEM, build_id_differences_only, etc.
• Lukas Puehringer updated both the python-securesystemslib package to version 0.22.0-1 and the in-toto package to 1.2.0-1.

In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his usual monthly reproducible builds status report.

Tooling diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 207, 208 and 209 to Debian unstable, as well as made the following changes to the code itself:

• Update minimum version of Black to prevent test failure on Ubuntu jammy. [ ]
• Updated the R test fixture for the 4.2.x series of the R programming language. [ ]

Brent Spillner also worked on adding graceful handling for UNIX sockets and named pipes to diffoscope. [ ][ ][ ]. Vagrant Cascadian also updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix. [ ][ ] reprotest is the Reproducible Build s project end-user tool to build the same source code twice in widely different environments and checking whether the binaries produced by the builds have any differences. This month, Santiago Ruano Rinc n added a new --append-build-command option [ ], which was subsequently uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • epub2txt2 (filesystem-related issue)
  • fdupes (toolchain issue)
  • grep (ASLR-related issue)
  • hello (PGO-related issue)
  • osdlyrics (date-related regression regression)
  • texlive (GZip modification time issue)
  • tuigreet (ordering issue)
• Huong Nguyenthi:
  • #1006646 filed against sgml-base.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1007232 filed against python-ara.
  • #1007757 filed against nbformat.
  • #1007760 filed against chemical-structures.
  • #1007908 filed against fiat.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1006844 filed against intel-mediasdk.
  • #1006858 filed against libao.
  • #1006860 & #1006861 filed against pcp.
  • #1006863 filed against tevent.
  • #1006864 filed against pcp.
  • #1006865 filed against apr-util.
  • #1006979 filed against liggghts.
  • #1007094 filed against kristall.
  • #1007095 filed against lmod.
  • #1007137 filed against libranlip.
  • #1007184 filed against xrt.
  • #1007185 filed against btrfsmaintenance.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

• Holger Levsen:
  • Replace a local copy of the dsa-check-running-kernel script with a packaged version. [ ]
  • Don t hide the status of offline hosts in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]
  • Detect undefined service problems in the node health check. [ ]
  • Update the sources.lst file for our mail server as its still running Debian buster. [ ]
  • Add our mail server to our node inventory so it is included in the Jenkins maintenance processes. [ ]
  • Remove the debsecan package everywhere; it got installed accidentally via the Recommends relation. [ ]
  • Document the usage of the osuosl174 host. [ ]

Regular node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen [ ], Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ] and Mattia Rizzolo.
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

Procmail is unmaintained procmail is unmaintained. The "Final release", according to Wikipedia, dates back to September 10, 2001 (3.22). That release was shipped in Debian since then, all the way back from Debian 3.0 "woody", twenty years ago. Debian also ships 25 uploads on top of this, with 3.22-21 shipping the "3.23pre" release that has been rumored since at least the November 2001, according to debian/changelog at least:

procmail (3.22-1) unstable; urgency=low
  * New upstream release, which uses the  standard' format for Maildir
    filenames and retries on name collision. It also contains some
    bug fixes from the 3.23pre snapshot dated 2001-09-13.
  * Removed  sendmail' from the Recommends field, since we already
    have  exim' (the default Debian MTA) and  mail-transport-agent'.
  * Removed suidmanager support. Conflicts: suidmanager (<< 0.50).
  * Added support for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS in the source package.
  * README.Maildir: Do not use locking on the example recipe,
    since it's wrong to do so in this case.
 -- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Wed, 21 Nov 2001 09:40:20 +0100

All Debian suites from buster onwards ship the 3.22-26 release, although the maintainer just pushed a 3.22-27 release to fix a seven year old null pointer dereference, after this article was drafted. Procmail is also shipped in all major distributions: Fedora and its derivatives, Debian derivatives, Gentoo, Arch, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. We all seem to be ignoring this problem. The upstream website (http://procmail.org/) has been down since about 2015, according to Debian bug #805864, with no change since. In effect, every distribution is currently maintaining its fork of this dead program. Note that, after filing a bug to keep Debian from shipping procmail in a stable release again, I was told that the Debian maintainer is apparently in contact with the upstream. And, surprise! they still plan to release that fabled 3.23 release, which has been now in "pre-release" for all those twenty years. In fact, it turns out that 3.23 is considered released already, and that the procmail author actually pushed a 3.24 release, codenamed "Two decades of fixes". That amounts to 25 commits since 3.23pre some of which address serious security issues, but none of which address fundamental issues with the code base.

Procmail is insecure By default, procmail is installed SUID root:mail in Debian. There's no debconf or pre-seed setting that can change this. There has been two bug reports against the Debian to make this configurable (298058, 264011), but both were closed to say that, basically, you should use dpkg-statoverride to change the permissions on the binary. So if anything, you should immediately run this command on any host that you have procmail installed on:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/procmail

Note that this might break email delivery. It might also not work at all, thanks to usrmerge. Not sure. Yes, everything is on fire. This is fine. In my opinion, even assuming we keep procmail in Debian, that default should be reversed. It should be up to people installing procmail to assign it those dangerous permissions, after careful consideration of the risk involved. The last maintainer of procmail explicitly advised us (in that null pointer dereference bug) and other projects (e.g. OpenBSD, in [2]) to stop shipping it, back in 2014. Quote:

Executive summary: delete the procmail port; the code is not safe and should not be used as a basis for any further work.

I just read some of the code again this morning, after the original author claimed that procmail was active again. It's still littered with bizarre macros like:

#define bit_set(name,which,value) \
  (value?(name[bit_index(which)] =bit_mask(which)):\
  (name[bit_index(which)]&=~bit_mask(which)))

... from regexp.c, line 66 (yes, that's a custom regex engine). Or this one:

#define jj  (aleps.au.sopc)

It uses insecure functions like strcpy extensively. malloc() is thrown around gotos like it's 1984 all over again. (To be fair, it has been feeling like 1984 a lot lately, but that's another matter entirely.) That null pointer deref bug? It's fixed upstream now, in this commit merged a few hours ago, which I presume might be in response to my request to remove procmail from Debian. So while that's nice, this is the just tip of the iceberg. I speculate that one could easily find an exploitable crash in procmail if only by running it through a fuzzer. But I don't need to speculate: procmail had, for years, serious security issues that could possibly lead to root privilege escalation, remotely exploitable if procmail is (as it's designed to do) exposed to the network. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe the procmail author will go through the code base and do a proper rewrite. But I don't think that's what is in the cards right now. What I expect will happen next is that people will start fuzzing procmail, throw an uncountable number of bug reports at it which will get fixed in a trickle while never fixing the underlying, serious design flaws behind procmail.

Procmail has better alternatives The reason this is so frustrating is that there are plenty of modern alternatives to procmail which do not suffer from those problems. Alternatives to procmail(1) itself are typically part of mail servers. For example, Dovecot has its own LDA which implements the standard Sieve language (RFC 5228). (Interestingly, Sieve was published as RFC 3028 in 2001, before procmail was formally abandoned.) Courier also has "maildrop" which has its own filtering mechanism, and there is fdm (2007) which is a fetchmail and procmail replacement. Update: there's also mailprocessing, which is not an LDA, but processing an existing folder. It was, however, specifically designed to replace complex Procmail rules. But procmail, of course, doesn't just ship procmail; that would just be too easy. It ships mailstat(1) which we could probably ignore because it only parses procmail log files. But more importantly, it also ships:

• lockfile(1) - conditional semaphore-file creator
• formail(1) - mail (re)formatter

lockfile(1) already has a somewhat acceptable replacement in the form of flock(1), part of util-linux (which is Essential, so installed on any normal Debian system). It might not be a direct drop-in replacement, but it should be close enough. formail(1) is similar: the courier maildrop package ships reformail(1) which is, presumably, a rewrite of formail. It's unclear if it's a drop-in replacement, but it should probably possible to port uses of formail to it easily.

Update: the maildrop package ships a SUID root binary (two, even). So if you want only reformail(1), you might want to disable that with:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/lockmail.maildrop 
dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/maildrop

It would be perhaps better to have reformail(1) as a separate package, see bug 1006903 for that discussion.

The real challenge is, of course, migrating those old .procmailrc recipes to Sieve (basically). I added a few examples in the appendix below. You might notice the Sieve examples are easier to read, which is a nice added bonus.

Conclusion There is really, absolutely, no reason to keep procmail in Debian, nor should it be used anywhere at this point. It's a great part of our computing history. May it be kept forever in our museums and historical archives, but not in Debian, and certainly not in actual release. It's just a bomb waiting to go off. It is irresponsible for distributions to keep shipping obsolete and insecure software like this for unsuspecting users. Note that I am grateful to the author, I really am: I used procmail for decades and it served me well. But now, it's time to move, not bring it back from the dead.

Appendix

Previous work It's really weird to have to write this blog post. Back in 2016, I rebuilt my mail setup at home and, to my horror, discovered that procmail had been abandoned for 15 years at that point, thanks to that LWN article from 2010. I would have thought that I was the only weirdo still running procmail after all those years and felt kind of embarrassed to only "now" switch to the more modern (and, honestly, awesome) Sieve language. But no. Since then, Debian shipped three major releases (stretch, buster, and bullseye), all with the same vulnerable procmail release. Then, in early 2022, I found that, at work, we actually had procmail installed everywhere, possibly because userdir-ldap was using it for lockfile until 2019. I sent a patch to fix that and scrambled to remove get rid of procmail everywhere. That took about a day. But many other sites are now in that situation, possibly not imagining they have this glaring security hole in their infrastructure.

Procmail to Sieve recipes I'll collect a few Sieve equivalents to procmail recipes here. If you have any additions, do contact me. All Sieve examples below assume you drop the file in ~/.dovecot.sieve.

deliver mail to "plus" extension folder Say you want to deliver user+foo@example.com to the folder foo. You might write something like this in procmail:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmail.log
VERBOSE=off
EXTENSION=$1            # Need to rename it - ?? does not like $1 nor 1
:0
* EXTENSION ?? [a-zA-Z0-9]+
        .$EXTENSION/

That, in sieve language, would be:

require ["variables", "envelope", "fileinto", "subaddress"];
########################################################################
# wildcard +extension
# https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/sieve/examples/#plus-addressed-mail-filtering
if envelope :matches :detail "to" "*"  
  # Save name in $ name  in all lowercase
  set :lower "name" "$ 1 ";
  fileinto "$ name ";
  stop;
 

Subject into folder This would file all mails with a Subject: line having FreshPorts in it into the freshports folder, and mails from alternc.org mailing lists into the alternc folder:

:0
## mailing list freshports
* ^Subject.*FreshPorts.*
.freshports/
:0
## mailing list alternc
* ^List-Post.*mailto:.*@alternc.org.*
.alternc/

Equivalent Sieve:

if header :contains "subject" "FreshPorts"  
    fileinto "freshports";
  elsif header :contains "List-Id" "alternc.org"  
    fileinto "alternc";
 

Mail sent to root to a reports folder This double rule:

:0
* ^Subject: Cron
* ^From: .*root@
.rapports/

Would look something like this in Sieve:

if header :comparator "i;octet" :contains "Subject" "Cron"  
  if header :regex :comparator "i;octet"  "From" ".*root@"  
        fileinto "rapports";
   
 

Note that this is what the automated converted does (below). It's not very readable, but it works.

Bulk email I didn't have an equivalent of this in procmail, but that's something I did in Sieve:

if header :contains "Precedence" "bulk"  
    fileinto "bulk";
 

Any mailing list This is another rule I didn't have in procmail but I found handy and easy to do in Sieve:

if exists "List-Id"  
    fileinto "lists";
 

This or that I wouldn't remember how to do this in procmail either, but that's an easy one in Sieve:

if anyof (header :contains "from" "example.com",
           header :contains ["to", "cc"] "anarcat@example.com")  
    fileinto "example";
 

You can even pile up a bunch of options together to have one big rule with multiple patterns:

if anyof (exists "X-Cron-Env",
          header :contains ["subject"] ["security run output",
                                        "monthly run output",
                                        "daily run output",
                                        "weekly run output",
                                        "Debian Package Updates",
                                        "Debian package update",
                                        "daily mail stats",
                                        "Anacron job",
                                        "nagios",
                                        "changes report",
                                        "run output",
                                        "[Systraq]",
                                        "Undelivered mail",
                                        "Postfix SMTP server: errors from",
                                        "backupninja",
                                        "DenyHosts report",
                                        "Debian security status",
                                        "apt-listchanges"
                                        ],
           header :contains "Auto-Submitted" "auto-generated",
           envelope :contains "from" ["nagios@",
                                      "logcheck@",
                                      "root@"])
     
    fileinto "rapports";
 

Automated script There is a procmail2sieve.pl script floating around, and mentioned in the dovecot documentation. It didn't work very well for me: I could use it for small things, but I mostly wrote the sieve file from scratch.

Progressive migration Enrico Zini has progressively migrated his procmail setup to Sieve using a clever way: he hooked procmail inside sieve so that he could deliver to the Dovecot LDA and progressively migrate rules one by one, without having a "flag day". See this explanatory blog post for the details, which also shows how to configure Dovecot as an LMTP server with Postfix.

Other examples The Dovecot sieve examples are numerous and also quite useful. At the time of writing, they include virus scanning and spam filtering, vacation auto-replies, includes, archival, and flags.

Harmful considered harmful I am aware that the "considered harmful" title has a long and controversial history, being considered harmful in itself (by some people who are obviously not afraid of contradictions). I have nevertheless deliberately chosen that title, partly to make sure this article gets maximum visibility, but more specifically because I do not have doubts at this moment that procmail is, clearly, a bad idea at this moment in history.

Developing story I must also add that, incredibly, this story has changed while writing it. This article is derived from this bug I filed in Debian to, quite frankly, kick procmail out of Debian. But filing the bug had the interesting effect of pushing the upstream into action: as mentioned above, they have apparently made a new release and merged a bunch of patches in a new git repository. This doesn't change much of the above, at this moment. If anything significant comes out of this effort, I will try to update this article to reflect the situation. I am actually happy to retract the claims in this article if it turns out that procmail is a stellar example of defensive programming and survives fuzzing attacks. But at this moment, I'm pretty confident that will not happen, at least not in scope of the next Debian release cycle.

• Firstly, Holger Levsen gave a talk titled Reproducible Buster, Bullseye & Bookworm - where we come from and where we are going (slides) which provided a high-level update on the status of reproducible builds within Debian, summing up the status in Debian Buster, Bullseye and then spoke about the outlook for Bookworm. This talk was also given at BornHack 2021 on the Danish island of Funen (schedule entry, video)
• Secondly, Vagrant Cascadian gave a talk titled Looking Forward to Reproducible Builds which mentions some historic blockers within Debian that have been solved, worked around or which are still in progress. It also touched on some recent developments, with an eye to what might happen as Debian embarks upon the new Bookworm development cycle after the release of Bullseye.
• Lastly, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues & Fr d ric Pierret gave a joint talk on Making use of snapshot.debian.org for fun and profit about various tools they have developed to interact with the snapshot.debian.org wayback machine for Debian packages. In particular, they mention how they are using the service to reproduce and validate builds as well as touch on an alternative snapshot service that has been mentioned in previous reports.

Software development kpcyrd announced an interesting new project this month called I probably didn t backdoor this which is an attempt to be:

a practical attempt at shipping a program and having reasonably solid evidence there s probably no backdoor. All source code is annotated and there are instructions explaining how to use reproducible builds to rebuild the artifacts distributed in this repository from source. The idea is shifting the burden of proof from you need to prove there s a backdoor to we need to prove there s probably no backdoor . This repository is less about code (we re going to try to keep code at a minimum actually) and instead contains technical writing that explains why these controls are effective and how to verify them. You are very welcome to adopt the techniques used here in your projects. ( )

As the project s README goes on the mention: the techniques used to rebuild the binary artifacts are only possible because the builds for this project are reproducible . This was also announced on our mailing list this month in a thread titled i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this: Reproducible Builds for upstreams. kpcyrd also wrote a detailed blog post about the problems surrounding Linux distributions (such as Alpine and Arch Linux) that distribute compiled Python bytecode in the form of .pyc files generated during the build process.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including releasing version 180), version 181) and version 182) as well as the following changes:

• New features:
  • Add support for extracting the signing block from Android APKs. [ ]
  • If we specify a suffix for a temporary file or directory within the code, ensure it starts with an underscore (ie. _ ) to make the generated filenames more human-readable. [ ]
  • Don t include short GCC lines that differ on a single prefix byte either. These are distracting, not very useful and are simply the strings(1) command s idea of the build ID, which is displayed elsewhere in the diff. [ ][ ]
  • Don t include specific .debug-like lines in the ELF-related output, as it is invariably a duplicate of the debug ID that exists better in the readelf(1) differences for this file. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Add a special case to SquashFS image extraction to not fail if we aren t the superuser. [ ]
  • Only use java -jar /path/to/apksigner.jar if we have an apksigner.jar as newer versions of apksigner in Debian use a shell wrapper script which will be rejected if passed directly to the JVM. [ ]
  • Reduce the maximum line length for calculating Wagner-Fischer, improving the speed of output generation a lot. [ ]
  • Don t require apksigner in order to compare .apk files using apktool. [ ]
  • Update calls (and tests) for the new version of odt2txt. [ ]
• Output improvements:
  • Mention in the output if the apksigner tool is missing. [ ]
  • Profile diffoscope.diff.linediff and specialize. [ ][ ]
• Logging improvements:
  • Format debug-level messages related to ELF sections using the diffoscope.utils.format_class. [ ]
  • Print the size of generated reports in the logs (if possible). [ ]
  • Include profiling information in --debug output if --profile is not set. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Clarify a comment about the HUGE_TOOLS Python dictionary. [ ]
  • We can pass -f to apktool to avoid creating a strangely-named subdirectory. [ ]
  • Drop an unused File import. [ ]
  • Update the supported & minimum version of Black. [ ]
  • We don t use the logging variable in a specific place, so alias it to an underscore (ie. _ ) instead. [ ]
  • Update some various copyright years. [ ]
  • Clarify a comment. [ ]
• Test improvements:
  • Update a test to check specific contents of SquashFS listings, otherwise it fails depending on the test systems user ID to username passwd(5) mapping. [ ]
  • Assign seen and expected values to local variables to improve contextual information in failed tests. [ ]
  • Don t print an orphan newline when the source code formatting test passes. [ ]

In addition Santiago Torres Arias added support for Squashfs version 4.5 [ ] and Felix C. Stegerman suggested a number of small improvements to the output of the new APK signing block [ ]. Lastly, Chris Lamb uploaded python-libarchive-c version 3.1-1 to Debian experimental for the new 3.x branch python-libarchive-c is used by diffoscope.

Distribution work In Debian, 68 reviews of packages were added, 33 were updated and 10 were removed this month, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Two new issue types have been identified too: nondeterministic_ordering_in_todo_items_collected_by_doxygen and kodi_package_captures_build_path_in_source_filename_hash. kpcyrd published another monthly report on their work on reproducible builds within the Alpine and Arch Linux distributions, specifically mentioning rebuilderd, one of the components powering reproducible.archlinux.org. The report also touches on binary transparency, an important component for supply chain security. The @GuixHPC account on Twitter posted an infographic on what fraction of GNU Guix packages are bit-for-bit reproducible: Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report for openSUSE.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • awkward (timestamp issue)
  • ck (build fails in single-CPU mode)
  • cri-o (build ID issue related to Go parallelism)
  • kernel-obs-build (cpio metadata issue)
  • python-PyQt6 (.pyc-related issue)
  • python-dulwich (fails to build in 2023)
  • python-xkbgroup (.pyc-related issue)
  • rnp (fails to build in 2024)
• Bj rn Forsman:
  • dosfstools (from December 2018) was eventually merged.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #992039 filed against mapcache.
  • #992059 filed against spatialindex.
  • #992060 filed against pytsk.
  • #992061 filed against surgescript.
  • #992126 filed against rust-coreutils.
  • #992772 filed against translate.
  • #992773 filed against spirv-cross.
  • #992804 filed against numcodecs.
  • #993279 filed against tty-solitaire.
  • #993304 filed against samtools.
• Simon McVittie:
  • #992620 filed against pkg-config.
  • #992622 filed against pkgconf.
  • #992645 filed against ncftp.
  • #992647 filed against backuppc.
  • #992651 filed against sharutils.
  • #992662 filed against cfengine3.
  • #992702 filed against nbdkit.
  • #992722 filed against nbdkit.
  • #992775 filed against python3.9.
  • #992781 filed against supermin.
  • #992782 filed against virt-p2v.
  • #993249 filed against gnunet.
  • #993250 filed against mpb.
  • #993275 filed against ng.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • vlc (libvlccore.so.* embeds the build username and hostname).
  • #991926, #991927 and #991928 filed against grub2.

Elsewhere, it was discovered that when supporting various new language features and APIs for Android apps, the resulting APK files that are generated now vary wildly from build to build (example diffoscope output). Happily, it appears that a patch has been committed to the relevant source tree. This was also discussed on our mailing list this month in a thread titled Android desugaring and reproducible builds started by Marcus Hoffmann.

Website and documentation There were quite a few changes to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including:

• Felix C. Stegerman:
  • Update the website self-build process to not use the buster-backports suite now that Debian Bullseye is the stable release. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add a new page documenting various package rebuilder solutions. [ ]
  • Add some historical talks and slides from DebConf20. [ ][ ]
  • Various improvements to the history page. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Rename the Comparison protocol documentation category to Verification . [ ]
  • Update links to F-Droid documentation. [ ]
• Ian Muchina:
  • Increase the font size of titles and de-emphasize event details on the talk page. [ ]
  • Rename the README file to README.md to improve the user experience when browsing the Git repository in a web browser. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Drop a position:fixed CSS statement that is negatively affecting with some width settings. [ ]
  • Fix the sizing of the elements inside the side navigation bar. [ ]
  • Show gold level sponsors and above in the sidebar. [ ]
  • Updated the documentation within reprotest to mention how ldconfig conflicts with the kernel variation. [ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Added a ticket number for the issue with the live Cinnamon image and diffoscope. [ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

• Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Make a large number of changes to support the new Debian bookworm release, including adding it to the dashboard [ ], start scheduling tests [ ], adding suitable Apache redirects [ ] etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Make the first build use LANG=C.UTF-8 to match the official Debian build servers. [ ]
    • Only test Debian Live images once a week. [ ]
    • Upgrade all nodes to use Debian Bullseye [ ] [ ]
    • Update README documentation for the Debian Bullseye release. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Only include rsync output if the $DEBUG variable is enabled. [ ]
    • Don t try to install mock, a tool used to build Fedora packages some time ago. [ ]
    • Drop an unused function. [ ]
    • Various documentation improvements. [ ][ ]
    • Improve the node health check to detect zombie jobs. [ ]
• Jessica Clarke (FreeBSD-related changes):
  • Update the location and branch name for the main FreeBSD Git repository. [ ]
  • Correctly ignore the source tarball when comparing build results. [ ]
  • Drop an outdated version number from the documentation. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Block F-Droid jobs from running whilst the setup is running. [ ]
  • Enable debugging for the rsync job related to Debian Live images. [ ]
  • Pass BUILD_TAG and BUILD_URL environment for the Debian Live jobs. [ ]
  • Refactor the master_wrapper script to use a Bash array for the parameters. [ ]
  • Prefer YAML s safe_load() function over the unsafe variant. [ ]
  • Use the correct variable in the Apache config to match possible existing files on disk. [ ]
  • Stop issuing HTTP 301 redirects for things that not actually permanent. [ ]
• Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
  • Increase the diffoscope timeout from 120 to 240 minutes; the Cinnamon image should now be able to finish. [ ]
  • Use the new snapshot service. [ ]
  • Make a number of improvements to artifact handling, such as moving the artifacts to the Jenkins host [ ] and correctly cleaning them up at the right time. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Where possible, link to the Jenkins build URL that created the artifacts. [ ][ ]
  • Only allow only one job to run at the same time. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Temporarily disable armhf nodes for DebConf21. [ ][ ]

Lastly, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit the Contribute page on our website. You can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter (@ReproBuilds) and Mastodon (@reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org).
• Reddit: /r/ReproducibleBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

Welcome to the April 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our regular reports we outline the most important things that we and the rest of the community have been up to over the past month. What are reproducible builds? One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. But whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into seemingly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

News It was discovered that more than 725 malicious packages were downloaded thousands of times from RubyGems, the official channel for distributing code for the Ruby programming language. Attackers used a variation of typosquatting and replaced hyphens and underscores (for example, uploading a malevolent atlas-client in place of atlas_client) that executed a script that intercepted Bitcoin payments. (Ars Technica report) Bernhard M. Wiedemann launched ismypackagereproducibleyet.org, a service that takes a package name as input and displays whether the package is reproducible in a number of distributions. For example, it can quickly show the status of Perl as being reproducible on openSUSE but not in Debian. Bernhard also improved the documentation of his unreproducible package to add some example patches for hash issues. [ ]. There was a post on Chaos Computer Club s website listing Ten requirements for the evaluation of Contact Tracing apps in relation to the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. In particular:

4. Transparency and verifiability: The complete source code for the app and infrastructure must be freely available without access restrictions to allow audits by all interested parties. Reproducible build techniques must be used to ensure that users can verify that the app they download has been built from the audited source code.

Elsewhere, Nicolas Boulenguez wrote a patch for the Ada programming language component of the GCC compiler to skip -f.*-prefix-map options when writing Ada Library Information files. Amongst other properties, these .ali files embed the compiler flags used at the time of the build which results in the absolute build path being recorded via -ffile-prefix-map, -fdebug-prefix-map, etc. In the Arch Linux project, kpcyrd reported that they held their first rebuilder workshop . The session was held on IRC and participants were provided a document with instructions on how to install and use Arch s repro tool. The meeting resulted in multiple people with no prior experience of Reproducible Builds validate their first package. Later in the month he also announced that it was now possible to run independent rebuilders under Arch in a hands-off, everything just works solution to distributed package verification. Mathias Lang submitted a pull request against dmd, the canonical compiler for the D programming languageto add support for our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable as well the other C preprocessor tokens such __DATE__, __TIME__ and __TIMESTAMP__ which was subsequently merged. SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH defines a distribution-agnostic standard for build toolchains to consume and emit timestamps in situations where they are deemed to be necessary. [ ] The Telegram instant-messaging platform announced that they had updated to version 5.1.1 continuing their claim that they are reproducible according to their full instructions and therefore verifying that its original source code is exactly the same code that is used to build the versions available on the Apple App Store and Google Play distribution platforms respectfully. Lastly, Herv Boutemy reported that 97% of the current development versions of various Maven packages appear to have a reproducible build. [ ]

Distribution work In Debian this month, 89 reviews of Debian packages were added, 21 were updated and 33 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Many issue types were noticed, categorised and updated by Chris Lamb, including:

• captures_build_path_in_hd5_database_files
• cargo_installs_crates2_json
• nondeterministic_devhelp_documentation_generated_by_gtk_doc
• ros_dynamic_reconfigure_captures_build_path

In addition, Holger Levsen filed a feature request against debrebuild, a tool for rebuilding a Debian package given a .buildinfo file, proposing to add --standalone or --one-shot-mode functionality.
In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann made the following changes:

• blender (sort C readdir call, rejected upstream)
• guile/guix (parallelism race condition)
• mingw32-filesystem/mingw32-binutils (sort readdir, filesystem, toolchain)
• mingw64-filesystem/mingw64-binutils (sort readdir, filesystem, toolchain)
• musescore (non-deterministic .zip files)
• OBS (FTBFS in rebuild)
• perl-Image-Sane (report hung build on a single core VM)
• ruby2.7 (date, already upstream)
• vtk (drop unreproducible .pyc file)

In Arch Linux, a rebuilder instance has been setup at reproducible.archlinux.org that is rebuilding Arch s [core] repository directly. The first rebuild has led to approximately 90% packages reproducible contrasting with 94% on the Reproducible Build s project own ArchLinux status page on tests.reproducible-builds.org that continiously builds packages and does not verify Arch Linux packages. More information may be found on the corresponding wiki page and the underlying decisions were explained on our mailing list.

Software development

diffoscope Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, the Reproducible Builds project s in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues (including preparing and uploading versions 139, 140, 141, 142 and 143 to Debian which were subsequently uploaded to the backports repository):

• Comparison improvements:
  • Dalvik .dex files can also serve as APK containers so restrict the narrower identification of .dex files to files ending with this extension and widen the identification of APK files to when file(1) discovers a Dalvik file. (#28)
  • Add support for Hierarchical Data Format (HD5) files. (#95)
  • Add support for .p7c and .p7b certificates. (#94)
  • Strip paths from the output of zipinfo(1) warnings. (#97)
  • Don t uselessly include the JSON similarity percentage if it is 0.0% . [ ]
  • Render multi-line difference comments in a way to show indentation. (#101)
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Add pdftotext as a requirement to run the PDF test_metadata text. (#99)
  • apktool 2.5.0 changed the handling of output of XML schemas so update and restrict the corresponding test to match. (#96)
  • Explicitly list python3-h5py in debian/tests/control.in to ensure that we have this module installed during a test run to generate the fixtures in these tests. [ ]
  • Correct parsing of ./setup.py test --pytest-args arguments. [ ]
• Misc:
  • Capitalise Ordering differences only in text comparison comments. [ ]
  • Improve documentation of FILE_TYPE_HEADER_PREFIX and FALLBACK_FILE_TYPE_HEADER_PREFIX to highlight that only the first 16 bytes are used. [ ]

Michael Osipov created a well-researched merge request to return diffoscope to using zipinfo directly instead of piping input via /dev/stdin in order to ensure portability to the BSD operating system [ ]. In addition, Ben Hutchings documented how --exclude arguments are matched against filenames [ ] and Jelle van der Waa updated the LLVM test fixture difference for LLVM version 10 [ ] as well as adding a reference to the name of the h5dump tool in Arch Linux [ ]. Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo also fixed in incorrect build dependency [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian enabled diffoscope to locate the openssl and h5dump packages on GNU Guix [ ][ ], and updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 141 [ ] and 143 [ ].

strip-nondeterminism strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. In April, Chris Lamb made the following changes:

• Add deprecation plans to all handlers documenting how or if they could be disabled and eventually removed, etc. (#3)
• Normalise *.sym files as Java archives. (#15)
• Add support for custom .zip filename filtering and exclude two patterns of files generated by Maven projects in fork mode. (#13)

disorderfs disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed a long-standing issue by not drop UNIX groups in FUSE multi-user mode when we are not root (#1) and uploaded version 0.5.9-1 to Debian unstable. Vagrant Cascadian subsequently refreshed disorderfs in GNU Guix to version 0.5.9 [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • elixir (parallelism)
  • gnutls (build failure)
  • moonjit/bcc (compile-time CPU-detection)
  • openstack (backport of patch to drop unreproducible sphinx .pickle files)
  • x3270 (merged, update date patch)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #958301 filed against dh-cargo.
  • #956549 filed against gmap.
  • #956591 filed against gpick.
  • #956477 filed against herbstluftwm.
  • #956304 filed against libcamera.
  • #956589 filed against libctl.
  • #956408 filed against minetest-mod-xdecor.
  • #955783 filed against netgen-lvs.
  • #958110 filed against nickle.
  • #958381 filed against nmrpflash.
  • #958382 filed against node-mqtt.
  • #956473 filed against sprai.
  • #955501 filed against yaz.
  • #956583 filed against xxhash.

In addition, Bernhard informed the following projects that their packages are not reproducible:

• acoular (report unknown non-determinism)
• cri-o (report a date issue)
• gnutls (report certtool being unable to extend certificates beyond 2049)
• gnutls (report copyright year variation)
• libxslt (report a bug about non-deterministic output from data corruption)
• python-astropy (report a future build failure in 2021)

Project documentation This month, Chris Lamb made a large number of changes to our website and documentation in the following categories:

• Community engagement improvements:
  • Update instructions to register for Salsa on our Contribute page now that the signup process has been overhauled. [ ]
  • Make it clearer that joining the rb-general mailing list is probably a first step for contributors to take. [ ]
  • Make our full contact information easier to find in the footer (#19) and improve text layout using bullets to separate sections [ ].
• Accessibility:
  • To improve accessibility, make all links underlined. (#12)
  • Use an enhanced foreground/background contrast ratio of 7.04:1. (#11)
• General improvements:
  • Add a new Academic publications page. (#22)
  • Add Trezor to our list of affiliated projects. (#26)
  • Add the JVM page to the documentation index (#17) and tidy the page itself a little [ ].
  • Add a GNU Libtool pointer to the Archive metadata documentation page. [ ]
• Internals:
  • Move to using jekyll-redirect-from over manual redirect pages [ ][ ] and add a redirect from /docs/buildinfo/ to /docs/recording/. (#23)
  • Limit the website self-check to not scan generated files [ ] and remove the old layout checker now that I have migrated all them [ ].
  • Move the news archive under the /news/ namespace [ ] and improve formatting of archived news links [ ].
  • Various improvements to the draft template generation. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

In addition, Holger Levsen clarified exactly which month we ceased to do weekly reports [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo adjusted the title style of an event page [ ]. Marcus Hoffman also started a discussion on our website s issue tracker asking for clarification on embedded signatures and Chris Lamb subsequently replied and asked Marcus to go ahead and propose a concrete change.

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org that, amongst many other tasks, tracks the status of our reproducibility efforts as well as identifies any regressions that have been introduced.

• Chris Lamb:
  • Print the build environment prior to executing a build. [ ]
  • Drop a misleading disorderfs-debug prefix in log output when we change non-disorderfs things in the file and, as it happens, do not run disorderfs at all. [ ]
  • The CSS for the package report pages added a margin to all <a> HTML elements under <li> ones, which was causing a comma/bullet spacing issue. [ ]
  • Tidy the copy in the project links sidebar. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • General:
    • Install jekyll-redirect-from as it now needed by the reproducible-builds.org website. [ ]
    • Improve/correct log parsing rules. [ ][ ]
  • Debian:
    • Reduce scheduling frequency of the buster distribution on the arm64 architecture, etc.. [ ][ ]
    • Show builds per day on a per-architecture basis for the last year on the Debian dashboard. [ ]
    • Drop the Subgraph OS package set as development halted in 2017 or 2018. [ ]
    • Update debrebuild to version from the latest version of devscripts. [ ][ ]
    • Add or improve various parts of the documentation. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Work on a Debian rebuilder:
    • Integrate sbuild. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Select a random .buildinfo file and attempt to build and compare the result. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve output and related output formatting. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Outline next steps for the development of the tool. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Various refactoring and code improvements. [ ][ ][ ]

Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo fixed some log parsing code regarding potentially-harmless warnings from package installation [ ][ ] and the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ] and Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ][ ].

---

Misc news On our mailing list this month, Santiago Torres asked whether we were still publishing releases of our tools to our website and Chris Lamb replied that this was not the case and fixed the issue. Later in the month Santiago also reported that the signature for the disorderfs package did not pass its GPG verification which was also fixed by Chris Lamb. Hans-Christoph Steiner of the Guardian Project asked whether there would be interest in making our website translatable which resulted in a WIP merge request being filed against the website and a discussion on how to track translation updates.
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Reddit: /r/ReproducibleBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Daniel Shahaf, Holger Levsen, Jelle van der Waa, kpcyrd, Mattia Rizzolo and Vagrant Cascadian. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

• The Tails project published a report on how they made their ISO images reproducible.
• dpkg 1.19.0 was uploaded, including support for:
  • Ordering the "unused substitution" warnings to prevent superfluous differences between logs of package builds on the Reproducible Builds test framework. (#870221)
  • A new Build-Kernel-Version field in .buildinfo files that can be generated with a new dpkg-genbuildinfo --always-include-kernel option. (#873937)

• On Saturday 21st October, Holger Levsen presented at All Systems Go! in Berlin, Germany on reproducible builds. A video recording is available already.

• On Tuesday 24th October, Chris Lamb will present at All Things Open 2017 in Raleigh, NC, USA.
• On Wednesday 25th October, Holger Levsen will present at the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, Czech Republic.
• On Saturday 28th October, Chris Lamb will present at freenode.live in Bristol, UK.
• From October 31st November 2nd we will be holding the 3rd Reproducible Builds summit in Berlin, Germany. If you are working in the field of reproducible builds, you should definitely attend. Please see our public invitation mail and contact us if you have any questions.

• On Tuesday 24th Oct Ed Maste from FreeBSD will be presenting some reproducible builds work for students.
• On From Tuesday 24th of October to Monday 7th of November students will work on fixing reproducibility issues brought up by the community. A milestone presentation will be held by Santiago Torres-Arias and Preston Moore.
• On Tuesday 7th November Holger Levsen will join the NYU team to wrap up the work.

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #878883 filed against stoken.
  • #878896 filed against liquidsoap.
  • #878980 filed against belenios.
  • #879042 filed against tuxpaint-config.
  • #879223 filed against websockify.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #878707 filed against python-amqp (randomness in documentation).
  • #878708 filed against geographiclib (build paths).
  • #879169 filed against live-build (timestamps).
• Gilles Filippini:
  • #878818 filed against ovito.

• Chris Lamb:
  • gerstensaft (#777414)
  • miniupnpd (#860266)
  • rest2web (#833438)

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • singularity (tar+gz)
  • redis (date)
  • tbb (date)
  • nested (sort)
  • nested (date)

• too_much_input_for_diff
• docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (49)
• Anthony DeRobertis (1)
• Daniel Schepler (1)
• Gilles Filippini (1)
• James Cowgill (1)
• Matthias Klose (1)
• Matthias Klumpp (1)
• Nobuhiro Iwamatsu (1)

• Ximin Luo:
  • Tentative support for for parallel diffs

• Chris Lamb:
  • Clojure considers the .class file to be stale if it shares the same timestamp of the .clj. We thus adjust the timestamps of the .clj to always be younger. (#877418)
  • dh_strip_nondeterminism: Log which handler processed a file. (#876140)
  • bin/strip-nondeterminism: Print a warning in --verbose mode if no canonical time specified.
  • Use HTTPS URI in debian/watch.

• Ximin Luo:
  • Hopefully fix the autopkgtest tests
• Santiago Torres-Arias:
  • An Arch Linux User Repository package for reprotest has been created.]

• Holger Levsen:
  • Install rustc on Jenkins for the reproducible-html-build-path-prefix-map-spec job.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • health_check: Include the running kernel version when reporting multiple kernel installed in /boot.

• Holger Levsen:
  • Berlin 2017:
    • add Qubes OS to participating projects
    • Add NetBSD and EdgeBSD to participating projects
    • Add repeatr.io to participating projects
    • Add disclaimer why only so few projects are listed
    • Add link to Google maps and name the 2nd next subway station on a different line
    • Add first 4 participating projects

• isdebianreproducibleyet.com was released and subsequently updated.

• Chris Lamb filed #874102 filed against texlive-bin to incorporate a proposed upstream change to fix reproducibility issues in generated PDF files.

• fastforward (#776972) (lamby)
• dtc-xen (#777322) (lamby)
• dhcpping (#777320) (lamby)
• vimoutliner (#776369) (lamby)

• The Linux kernel announced support for the randstruct GCC plugin.
• "Please make the output of gio-querymodules deterministic" was merged upstream. (lamby)

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • gcin: (merged) Uninitialized stack memory
  • html5-parser (merged): Sorting
  • gromacs (merged): Date
  • crawl (merged): Date
  • GCompris-gtk: Date
  • heimdal: Date, hostname
• Chris Lamb:
  • Numpy (#872459) (PR #9652) build path (merged)

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #874186 filed against svgpp.

• Adrian Bunk (15)

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add support for "binwalking" to find (eg.) concatenated CPIO archives. (Closes: #820631)
  • Loosen matching of file(1)'s output to ensure we correctly also match TTF files under file 5.32.
  • Check we identify all CPIO fixtures in tests
  • Make failing a some flake8 tests cause the testsuite to fail. (Currently just "undefined name")
  • Countless style fixups, eg. remove unused imports, removing blank lines from end of flies, etc.
  • Compare None using identity, not equality.
  • diffoscope.diff: Correct reference to self.buf.
  • comparators.utils.file: Correct reference to path_apparent_size.
• Juliana Rodrigues:
  • Sip html_visuals test if 'sng' binary is not available
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Numerous PEP8 fixes (eg. E122, E302, E713, etc.)

• Santiago Torres:
  • Correct string formatting in get_all_servers
• Ximin Luo:
  • Heavy refactoring towards supporting running more than 2 builds
  • Rename append_command to append_to_build_command

• h01ger:
  • Don't update the stretch package sets anymore
  • Update URL for Tails packages list
  • Disabled the OpenWrt at the request of lynxis as they were broken; if no-one shows up to fix them, we'll probably remove them in the future, as all current development happens within LEDE.
  • Renewed the Let's Encrypt SSL certificates.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Avoid stale temporary files from reproducible_build.sh
  • Avoid removing the temporary directory twice
  • Fix IRC notifications when somebody asks for artifacts
  • Simplify 'if' conditions

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • File ordering:
    • klee-uclibc: sort
    • libdnet: sort
    • libinvm-cim: sort
    • libinvm-cli: sort
  • Embedded build-date timestamps:
    • robinhood: SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support
    • ceph/rocksdb: SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support
    • hylafax: use changelog modtime
    • gnucash: use changelog modtime
  • Warzone2100, merged: omit timestamps, sort file lists
• Chris Lamb:
  • glib2.0: sort file lists
  • (old) xorg, merged: SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #873608 filed against uhd.
  • #874186 filed against svgpp.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #873625 filed against glib2.0, filed upstream.
  • #874102 filed against texlive-bin.

• Chris Lamb:
  • bittornado/0.3.18-10.3 from #796212
  • cgilib/0.6-1.1 from #776935
  • dict-gazetteer2k/1.0.0-5.4 from #776376
  • dict-moby-thesaurus/1.0-6.4 from #776375
  • dtaus/0.9-1.1 from #777321
  • wily/0.13.41-7.3 from #777360

• Adrian Bunk (46)
• Mart n Ferrari (1)
• Steve Langasek (1)

• Mattia Rizzolo
  • tests/binary: skip a test if the 'distro' module is not available.
  • Some code quality and style improvements.
• Guangyuan Yang
  • tests/iso9660: support both cdrtools' genisoimage's versions of isoinfo.
• Chris Lamb
  • comparators/xml: Use name attribute over path to avoid leaking comparison full path in output.
  • Tidy diffoscope.progress a little.
• Ximin Luo
  • Add a --tool-prefix-binutils CLI flag. Closes: #869868
  • On non-GNU systems, prefer some tools that start with "g". Closes: #871029
  • presenters/html: Don't traverse children whose parents were already limited. Closes: #871413
• Santiago Torres-Arias
  • diffoscope.progress: Support the new fork of python-progressbar. Closes: #873157

• Ximin Luo:
  • Add -v/--verbose which is a bit more popular.
  • Make it possible to omit "auto" when building packages.
  • Refactor how the config file works, in preparation for new features.
  • chown -h for security.