Search Results: "anton"

17 March 2017

Antonio Terceiro: Patterns for Testing Debian Packages

At the and of 2016 I had the pleasure to attend the 11th Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, a.k.a SugarLoaf PLoP. PLoP is a series of conferences on Patterns (as in Design Patterns ), a subject that I appreciate a lot. Each of the PLoP conferences but the original main big conference has a funny name. SugarLoaf PLoP is called that way because its very first edition was held in Rio de Janeiro, so the organizers named it after a very famous mountain in Rio. The name stuck even though a long time has passed since it was held in Rio for the last time. 2016 was actually the first time SugarLoaf PLoP was held outside of Brazil, finally justifying the Latin American part of its name. I was presenting a paper I wrote on patterns for testing Debian packages. The Debian project funded my travel expenses through the generous donations of its supporters. PLoP s are very fun conferences with a relaxed atmosphere, and is amazing how many smart (and interesting!) people gather together for them. My paper is titled Patterns for Writing As-Installed Tests for Debian Packages , and has the following abstract:
Large software ecosystems, such as GNU/Linux distributions, demand a large amount of effort to make sure all of its components work correctly invidually, and also integrate correctly with each other to form a coherent system. Automated Quality Assurance techniques can prevent issues from reaching end users. This paper presents a pattern language originated in the Debian project for automated software testing in production-like environments. Such environments are closer in similarity to the environment where software will be actually deployed and used, as opposed to the development environment under which developers and regular Continuous Integration mechanisms usually test software products. The pattern language covers the handling of issues arising from the difference between development and production-like environments, as well as solutions for writing new, exclusive tests for as-installed functional tests. Even though the patterns are documented here in the context of the Debian project, they can also be generalized to other contexts.
In practical terms, the paper documents a set of patterns I have noticed in the last few years, when I have been pushing the Debian Continous Integration project. It should be an interesting read for people interested in the testing of Debian packages in their installed form, as done with autopkgtest. It should also be useful for people from other distributions interested in the subject, as the issues are not really Debian-specific. I have recently finished the final version of the paper, which should be published in the ACM Digital Library at any point now. You can download a copy of the paper in PDF. Source is also available, if you are into markdown, LaTeX, makefiles and this sort of thing. If everything goes according to plan, I should be presenting a talk on this at the next Debconf in Montreal.

20 February 2017

Russ Allbery: Haul via parents

My parents were cleaning out a bunch of books they didn't want, so I grabbed some of the ones that looked interesting. A rather wide variety of random stuff. Also, a few more snap purchases on the Kindle even though I've not been actually finishing books recently. (I do have two finished and waiting for me to write reviews, at least.) Who knows when, if ever, I'll read these. Mark Ames Going Postal (nonfiction)
Catherine Asaro The Misted Cliffs (sff)
Ambrose Bierce The Complete Short Stores of Ambrose Bierce (collection)
E. William Brown Perilous Waif (sff)
Joseph Campbell A Hero with a Thousand Faces (nonfiction)
Jacqueline Carey Miranda and Caliban (sff)
Noam Chomsky 9-11 (nonfiction)
Noam Chomsky The Common Good (nonfiction)
Robert X. Cringely Accidental Empires (nonfiction)
Neil Gaiman American Gods (sff)
Neil Gaiman Norse Mythology (sff)
Stephen Gillet World Building (nonfiction)
Donald Harstad Eleven Days (mystery)
Donald Harstad Known Dead (mystery)
Donald Harstad The Big Thaw (mystery)
James Hilton Lost Horizon (mainstream)
Spencer Johnson The Precious Present (nonfiction)
Michael Lerner The Politics of Meaning (nonfiction)
C.S. Lewis The Joyful Christian (nonfiction)
Grigori Medredev The Truth about Chernobyl (nonfiction)
Tom Nadeu Seven Lean Years (nonfiction)
Barak Obama The Audacity of Hope (nonfiction)
Ed Regis Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (nonfiction)
Fred Saberhagen Berserker: Blue Death (sff)
Al Sarrantonio (ed.) Redshift (sff anthology)
John Scalzi Fuzzy Nation (sff)
John Scalzi The End of All Things (sff)
Kristine Smith Rules of Conflict (sff)
Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (nonfiction)
Alan W. Watts The Book (nonfiction)
Peter Whybrow A Mood Apart (nonfiction) I've already read (and reviewed) American Gods, but didn't own a copy of it, and that seemed like a good book to have a copy of. The Carey and Brown were snap purchases, and I picked up a couple more Scalzi books in a recent sale.

2 January 2017

Ross Gammon: Happy New Year My Free Software activities in December 2016

So that was 2016! Here s a summary of what I got up to on my computer(s) in December, a check of how I went against my plan, and the TODO list for the next month or so. With a short holiday to Oslo, Christmas holidays, Christmas parties (at work and with Alexander at school, football etc.), travelling to Brussels with work, birthdays (Alexander & Antje), I missed a lot of deadlines, and failed to reach most of my Free Software goals (including my goals for new & updated packages in Debian Stretch the soft freeze is in a couple of days). To top it all off, I lost my grandmother at the ripe old age of 93. Rest in peace Nana. I wish I could have made it to the funeral, but it is sometimes tough living on the other side of the world to your family. Debian Ubuntu Other Plan status & update for next month Debian Before the 5th January 2017 Debian Stretch soft freeze I hope to: For the Debian Stretch release: Ubuntu Other

9 October 2016

Nathan Handler: Ohio Linux Fest

This weekend, I traveled to Columbus, Ohio to attend Ohio Linux Fest. I departed San Francisco early on Thursday. It was interesting getting to experience the luxurious side of flying as I enjoyed a mimosa in the American Express Centurion lounge for the first time. I even happend to cross paths with Corey Quinn, who was on his way to [DevOpsDays Boise]. While connecting in Houston, I met up with the always awesome Jos Antonio Rey, who was to be my travel companion for this trip. The long day of travel took its toll on us, so we had a lazy Friday morning before checking in for the conference around lunch time. I was not that interested in the afternoon sessions, so I spent the majority of the first day helping out at the Ubuntu booth and catching up with friends and colleagues. The day ended with a nice Happy Hour sponsored by Oracle. Saturday was the main day for the conference. Ethan Galstad, Founder and CEO of Nagios, started the day with a Keynote about Becoming the Next Tech Entrepreneur. Next up was Elizabeth K. Joseph with A Tour of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios. While I ve read plenty about OpenStack, I ve never actually used it before. As a result, this demo and introduction was great to watch. It was entertaining to watch her login to CirrOS with the default password of cubswin:), as the Chicago Cubs are currently playing the San Francisco Giants in the National League Divisional Series (and winning). Unfortunately, I was not able to win a copy of her new Common OpenStack Deployments book, but it was great getting to watch her signing copies for other attendees after all of the hard work that went into writing the book. For lunch, Jos , Elizabeth, and Svetlana Belkin all gathered together for an informal Ubuntu lunch. Finally, it was time for me to give my talk. This was the same talk I gave at FOSSCON, but this time, I had a significantly larger audience. Practice definitely makes perfect, as my delivery was a lot better the second time giving this talk. Afterwards, I had a number of people come up to me to let me know that they really enjoyed the presentation. Pro Tip: If you ever attend a talk, the speaker will really appreciate any feedback you send their way. Even if it is a simple, Thank You , it really means a lot. One of the people who came up to me after the talk was Unit193. We have known each other through Ubuntu for years, but there has never been an opportunity to meet in person. I am proud to be able to say with 99% confidence that he is not a robot, and is in fact a real person. Next up was a lesson about the /proc filesystem. While I ve explored it a bit on my own before, I still learned a few tips and tricks about information that can be gained from the files in this magical directory. Following this was a talk about Leading When You re Not the Boss. It was even partially taught by a dummy (the speaker was a ventriloquist). The last regular talk of the day was one of the more interesting ones I attended. It was a talk by Patrick Shuff from Facebook about how they have built a load balancer than can handle a billion users. The slide deck was well-made with very clear diagrams. The speaker was also very knowledgeable and dealt with the plethora of questions he received. Prior to the closing keynote was a series of lightning talks. These served as a great means to get people laughing after a long day of talks. The closing keynote was given by father and daughter Joe and Lilly Born about The Democratization of Invention. Both of them had very interesting stories, and Lily was quite impressive given her age. We skipped the Nagios After Party in favor of a more casual pizza dinner. Overall, it was a great conference, and I am very glad to have had the opportunity to attend. A big thanks to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for fudning my travel through the Ubuntu Community Fund and to the Ohio Linux Fest staff for allowing me the opportunity to speak at such a great conference.

6 October 2016

Nathan Handler: FOSSCON

This post is long past due, but I figured it is better late than never. At the start of the year, I set a goal to get more involved with attending and speaking at conferences. Through work, I was able to attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Pasadena, CA in January. I also got to give a talk at O'Relly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Austin, TX in May. However, I really wanted to give a talk about my experience contributing in the Ubuntu community. Jos Antonio Rey encouraged me to submit the talk to FOSSCON. While I've been aware of FOSSCON for years thanks to my involvement with the freenode IRC network (which has had a reference to FOSSCON in the /motd for years), I had never actually attended it before. I also wasn't quite sure how I would handle traveling from San Francisco, CA to Philadelphia, PA. Regardless, I decided to go ahead and apply. Fast forward a few weeks, and imagine my surprise when I woke up to an email saying that my talk proposal was accepted. People were actually interested in me and what I had to say. I immediately began researching flights. While they weren't crazy expensive, they were still more money than I was comfortable spending. Luckily, Jos had a solution to this problem as well; he suggested applying for funding through the Ubuntu Community Donations fund. While I've been an Ubuntu Member for over 8 years, I've never used this resource before. However, I was happy when I received a very quick approval. The conference itself was smaller than I was expecting. However, it was packed with lots of friendly and familiar faces of people I've interacted with online and in person over the years at various Open Source events. I started off the day by learning from Jos how to use Juju to quickly setup applications in the cloud. While Juju has definitely come a long way over the last couple of years, and it appears t be quite easy to learn and use, it still appears to be lacking some of the features needed to take full control over how the underlying applications interact with each other. However, I look forward to continuing to watch it grow and mature. Net up, we had a lunch break. There was no catered lunch at this conference, so we decided to get some cheesesteak at Abner's (is any trip to Philadelphia complete without cheesesteak?). Following lunch, I took some time to make a few last minute changes to my presentation and rehearse a bit. Finally, it was time. I got up in front of the audience and gave my presentation. Overall, I was quite pleased. It was not perfect, but for the first time giving the talk, I thought it went pretty well. I will work hard to make it even better for next tme. Following my talk was a series of brief lightning talks prior to the closing keynote. Another long time friend of mine, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, was giving the keynote about listening to the needs of your global open source community. While I have seen her speak on several other occassions, I really enjoyed this particular talk. It was full of great examples and anecdotes that were easy for the audience to relate to and start applying to their own communities. After the conference, a few of us went off and played tourist, paying the Liberty Bell a visit before concluding our trip in Philadelpha. Overall, I had a great time as FOSSCON. It was great being re-united with so many friends. A big thank you to Jos for his constant support and encouragement and to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for helping to make it possible for me to attend this conference. Finally, thanks to the terrific FOSSCON staff for volunteering so much time to put on this great event.

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 75 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 25 and Saturday October 1 2016: Statistics For the first time, we reached 91% reproducible packages in our testing framework on testing/amd64 using a determistic build path. (This is what we recommend to make packages in Stretch reproducible.) For unstable/amd64, where we additionally test for reproducibility across different build paths we are at almost 76% again. IRC meetings We have a poll to set a time for a new regular IRC meeting. If you would like to attend, please input your available times and we will try to accommodate for you. There was a trial IRC meeting on Friday, 2016-09-31 1800 UTC. Unfortunately, we did not activate meetbot. Despite this participants consider the meeting a success as several topics where discussed (eg changes to IRC notifications of tests.r-b.o) and the meeting stayed within one our length. Upcoming events Reproduce and Verify Filesystems - Vincent Batts, Red Hat - Berlin (Germany), 5th October, 14:30 - 15:20 @ LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe 2016. From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE & coreboot - Holger "h01ger" Levsen and Alexander "lynxis" Couzens - Berlin (Germany), 13th October, 11:00 - 11:25 @ OpenWrt Summit 2016. Introduction to Reproducible Builds - Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the SeaGL.org Conference In Seattle (USA), November 11th-12th, 2016. Previous events GHC Determinism - Bartosz Nitka, Facebook - Nara (Japan), 24th September, ICPF 2016. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Meskes uploaded bsdmainutils/9.0.11 to unstable with a fix for #830259 based on Reiner Herrmann's patch. This fixed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder issue in the affected packages (freebsd-libs, mmh). devscripts/2.16.8 was uploaded to unstable. It includes a debrepro script by Antonio Terceiro which is similar in purpose to reprotest but more lightweight; specific to Debian packages and without support for virtual servers or configurable variations. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible in our testing framework after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 77 package reviews have been added, 178 have been updated and 80 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 6 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work As part of reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development A new version of diffoscope 61 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Post-release there were further contributions from: reprotest development A new version of reprotest 0.3.2 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from: Post-release there were further contributions from: tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

10 September 2016

Sylvain Le Gall: Release of OASIS 0.4.7

I am happy to announce the release of OASIS v0.4.7. Logo OASIS small OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse projects easily. This tool is freely inspired by Cabal which is the same kind of tool for Haskell. You can find the new release here and the changelog here. More information about OASIS in general on the OASIS website. Pull request for inclusion in OPAM is pending. Here is a quick summary of the important changes: Features: This version contains a lot of changes and is the achievement of a huge amount of work. The addition of OMake as a plugin is a huge progress. The overall work has been targeted at making OASIS more library like. This is still a work in progress but we made some clear improvement by getting rid of various side effect (like the requirement of using "chdir" to handle the "-C", which leads to propage ~ctxt everywhere and design OASISFileSystem). I would like to thanks again the contributor for this release: Spiros Eliopoulos, Paul Snively, Jeremie Dimino, Christopher Zimmermann, Christophe Troestler, Max Mouratov, Jacques-Pascal Deplaix, Geoff Shannon, Simon Cruanes, Vladimir Brankov, Gabriel Radanne, Evgenii Lepikhin, Petter Urkedal, Gerd Stolpmann and Anton Bachin.

7 September 2016

Antonio Terceiro: Debian CI updates for September 2016

debci 1.4 was released just a few days ago. Among general improvements, I would like to highlight: ci.debian.net has been upgraded to debci 1.4 just after that. At the same time I have also upgraded autodep8 and autopkgtest to their latest versions, available in jessie-backports. This means that it is now safe for Debian packages to assume the changes in autopkgtest 4.0 are available, in special the $AUTOPKGTEST_* environment variables. In other news, for several weeks there were had issues with tests not being scheduled when they should have. I was just assuming that the issue was due to the existing test scheduler, debci-batch, being broken. Today I was working on a new implementation that is going to be a lot faster, I started to hit a similar issue on my local tests, and finally realized what was wrong. The fact is that debci-batch stores the timestamp of the last time a package has been scheduled to run, and it there are no test result after that timestamp, it assumes the package is still in the queue to be tested, and does not schedule it again. It turns out that a few weeks ago, during maintainance work, I had cleared the queue, discarding all jobs that were there, but forgot to reset those timestamps, so when debci-batch came around again, it checked the timestamp of the last request and did not make new requests because there was no test result after that timestamp! I cleared all those timestamps, and the system should now go back to normal. That is it for now. I you want to contribute to the Debian CI project and want to get in touch, you can pop up on the #debci channel on the OFTC IRC network, or mail the autopkgtest-devel mailing list.

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 71 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 28 and Saturday September 3 2016: Media coverage Antonio Terceiro blogged about testing build reprodubility with debrepro . GSoC and Outreachy updates The next round is being planned now: see their page with a timeline and participating organizations listing. Maybe you want to participate this time? Then please reach out to us as soon as possible! Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following packages have addressed reproducibility issues in other packages: The following updated packages have become reproducible in our current test setup after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out yet. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) The following 4 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 706 package reviews have been added, 22 have been updated and 16 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 5 issue types have been added: 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development diffoscope development on the next version (60) continued in git, taking in contributions from: strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.023-2~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. A new version of strip-nondeterminism 0.024-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. disorderfs development Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: We now vary the GECOS records of the two build users. Thanks to Paul Wise for providing the patch. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

3 September 2016

Antonio Terceiro: testing build reprodubility with debrepro

Earlier today I was handling a reproducibility bug and decided I had to try a reproducibility test by myself. I tried reprotest, but I was being hit by a disorderfs issue and I was not sure whether the problem was with reprotest or not (at this point I cannot reproduce that anymore). So I decided to hack a simple script to that, and it works. I even included it in devscripts after writing a manpage. Of course reprotest is more complete, extensible, and supports arbitrary virtualization backends for doing the more dangerous/destructive variations (such as changing the hostname and other things that require root) but for quick tests debrepro does the job. Usage examples: 

$ debrepro                                 # builds current directory
$ debrepro /path/to/sourcepackage          # builds package there
$ gbp-buildpackage --git-builder=debrepro  # can be used with vcs wrappers as well
debrepro will do two builds with a few variations between them, including $USER, $PATH, timezone, locale, umask, current time, and will even build under disorderfs if available. Build path variation is also performed because by definition the builds are done in different directories. If diffoscope is installed, it will be used for deep comparison of non-matching binaries. If you are interested and don t want to build devscripts from source or wait for the next release, you can just grab the script, save it as debrepro somewhere on your $PATH and make it executable.

23 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 69 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 14 and Saturday August 20 2016: Fasten your seatbelts Important note: we enabled build path variation for unstable now, so your package(s) might become unreproducible, while previously it was said to be reproducible given a specific build path it probably still is reproducible but read on for the details below in the tests.reproducible-builds.org section! As said many times: this is still research and we are working to make it reality. Media coverage Daniel Stender blogged about python packaging and explained some caveats regarding reproducible builds. Toolchain developments Thomas Schmitt uploaded xorriso which now obeys SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. As stated in its man pages: 
ENVIRONMENT
[...]
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH  belongs to the specs of reproducible-builds.org.  It
is supposed to be either undefined or to contain a decimal number which
tells the seconds since january 1st 1970. If it contains a number, then
it is used as time value to set the  default  of  --modification-date=,
--gpt_disk_guid,  and  --set_all_file_dates.  Startup files and program
options can override the effect of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) The following 2 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: tagsoup tclx8.4. Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Bug tracker house keeping: Reviews of unreproducible packages 55 package reviews have been added, 161 have been updated and 136 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo worked on diffoscope this week. Improvements were made to SquashFS and JSON comparison, the https://try.diffoscope.org/ web service, documentation, packaging, and general code quality. diffoscope 57, 58, and 59 were uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. Versions 57 and 58 were both broken, so Holger set up a job on jenkins.debian.net to test diffoscope on each git commit. He also wrote a CONTRIBUTING document to help prevent this from happening in future. From these efforts, we were also able to learn that diffoscope is now reproducible even when built across multiple architectures: 
< h01ger>   https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/diffoscope.html shows these packages were built on amd64:
< h01ger>    bd21db708fe91c01ba1c9cb35b9d41a7c9b0db2b 62288 diffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>    366200bf2841136a4c8f8c30bdc87057d59a4cdd 20146 trydiffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>   and on i386:
< h01ger>    bd21db708fe91c01ba1c9cb35b9d41a7c9b0db2b 62288 diffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>    366200bf2841136a4c8f8c30bdc87057d59a4cdd 20146 trydiffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>   and on armhf:
< h01ger>    bd21db708fe91c01ba1c9cb35b9d41a7c9b0db2b 62288 diffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>    366200bf2841136a4c8f8c30bdc87057d59a4cdd 20146 trydiffoscope_59_all.deb
And those also match the binaries uploaded by Chris in his diffoscope 59 binary upload to ftp.debian.org, yay! Eating our own dogfood and enjoying it! tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian related: The last change probably will have an impact you will see: your package might become unreproducible in unstable and this will be shown on tracker.debian.org, while it will still be reproducible in testing. We've done this, because we think reproducible builds are possible with arbitrary build paths. But: we don't think those are a realistic goal for stretch, where we still recommend to use .buildinfo to record the build patch and then do rebuilds using that path. We are doing this, because besides doing theoretical groundwork we also have a practical goal: enable users to independently verify builds. And if they only can do this with a fixed path, so be it. For now :) To be clear: for Stretch we recommend that reproducible builds are done in the same build path as the "original" build. Finally, and just for our future references, when we enabled build path variation on Saturday, August 20th 2016, the numbers for unstable were:
suite all reproducible unreproducible ftbfs depwait not for this arch blacklisted
unstable/amd64 24693 21794 (88.2%) 1753 (7.1%) 972 (3.9%) 65 (0.2%) 95 (0.3%) 10 (0.0%)
unstable/i386 24693 21182 (85.7%) 2349 (9.5%) 972 (3.9%) 76 (0.3%) 103 (0.4%) 10 (0.0%)
unstable/armhf 24693 20889 (84.6%) 2050 (8.3%) 1126 (4.5%) 199 (0.8%) 296 (1.1%) 129 (0.5%)
Misc. Ximin Luo updated our git setup scripts to make it easier for people to write proper descriptions for our repositories. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

9 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

7 August 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.1: Updates schmupdates!

One year ago (tomorrow) drat 0.1.0 was released. It held up rather well, but a number of small fixes and enhancements piled up, along with somewhat-finished to still-raw additions to the examples/ sections. With that, we are happy to announce drat release 0.1.1 which arrived on CRAN earlier today. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories is what we use. In other words, friends don't let friends use install_github(). Just kidding. Maybe. Or not. This version 0.1.1 builds on the previous release from one year ago. Several users sent in nicely focused pull request, and I added a bit of spit and polish here and there. The NEWS file (added belatedly in this release) summarises the release as follows:
Changes in drat version 0.1.1 (2016-08-07)
  • Changes in drat functionality
    • Use dir.exists, leading to versioned Depends on R (>= 3.2.0)
    • Optionally pull remote before insert (Mark in PR #38)
    • Fix support for dots (Jan G. in PR #40)
    • Accept dots in package names (Antonio in PR #48)
    • Switch to htpps URLs at GitHub (Colin in PR #50)
    • Support additional fields in PACKAGE file (Jan G. in PR #54)
  • Changes in drat documentation
    • Further improvements and clarifications to vignettes
    • Travis script switched to run.sh from our fork
    • This NEWS file was (belatedly) added
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

29 July 2016

Luciano Prestes Cavalcanti: Contributing with Debian Recommendation System

Hi, my name is Luciano Prestes, I am participating in the program Google Summer of Code (GSoC), my mentor is Antonio Terceiro, and my co-mentor is Tassia Camoes, both are Debian Developers. The project that I am contributing is the AppRecommender, which is a package recommender for Debian systems, my goal is to add a new strategy of recommendation to AppRecommender, to make it recommend packages after the user installs a new package with 'apt'.
At principle AppRecommender has three recommendation strategies, being them, content-based, collaborative and hybrid. To my work on GSoC this text explains two of these strategies, content-based and collaborative. Content-based strategy get the user packages and analyzes yours descriptions to find another Debian packages that they are similar to the user packages, so AppRecommender uses the content of user packages to recommender similar packages to user. The collaborative strategy compare the user packages with the packages of another users, and then recommends packages that users with similar profile have, where a profile of user is your packages. On her work, Tassia Camoes uses the popularity-contest data to compare the users profiles on the collaborative strategy, the popularity-contest is an application that get the users packages into a submission and send to the popularity-contest server and generates statistical data analyzing the users packages.
I have been working with a classmate on our bachelor thesis since August 2015, in our work we created new strategies to AppRecommender, one using machine-learning and another using a deterministic method to generates the recommendation, another feature that we implemented its improve the user profile using the recently used packages to makes the profile. During our work we study the collaborative strategy and analyzed that strategy and remove it from AppRecommender, because this implementation of collaborative strategy needs to get the popularity-contest submissions on the user's pc, and this is against the privacy policy of popularity-contest.
My work on Google Summer of Code is create a new strategy on AppRecommender, as described above, where this strategy should be able to get an referenced package, or a list of referenced packages, then analyze the users packages making a recommendation using the referenced packages such as base, example: if users run "$ sudo apt install vim", the AppRecommender use "vim" as referenced package, and should recommender packages with relation between "vim" and the other packages that user has installed. This new strategy can be implemented like a content-based strategy, or the collaborative strategy.
The first month of Google Summer of Code its destined to students knows the community of the project, so I talk with the Debian community about my project, to get feedback and ideas about the project. I talk with Debian community on IRC channels, and then came the idea to use the data of popularity-contest to improve the recommendations. Talking with my mentors, they approve the idea of usage popularity-contest data, so we started a discussion about how to use the popularity-contest data on AppRecommender without broken the privacy policy of popularity-contest.
Now my work on Google Summer of Code is create the new strategy for AppRecommender that can makes recommendation using a list of packages as reference, so as explained above, when user install packages like "sudo apt install vim vagrant", AppRecommender should recommends packages with relation between the packages "vim" and "vagrant", and this recommendation should be relation with the user profile. The other work its use the popularity-contest data to improve the recommendations of AppRecommender using a new model of collaborative strategies.

3 July 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 61 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 19th and June 25th 2016. Media coverage GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Emil Velikov searched on IRC for hints on how to guarantee unique values during build to invalidate shader caches in Mesa, when also no VCS information is available. A possible solution is a timestamp, which is unique enough for local builds, but can still be reproducible by allowing it to be overwritten with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Packages fixed The following 9 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: cclib librun-parts-perl llvm-toolchain-snapshot python-crypto python-openid r-bioc-shortread r-bioc-variantannotation ruby-hdfeos5 sqlparse The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 139 reviews have been added, 20 have been updated and 21 have been removed in this week. New issues found: 53 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Mateusz ukasik. diffoscope development Quote of the week "My builds are so reproducible, they fail exactly every second time." Johannes Ziemke (@discordianfish) Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb (lamby), Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

21 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 60 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 12th and June 18th 2016: Media coverage GSoC and Outreachy updates Weekly reports by our participants: Toolchain fixes With this upload of texlive-bin we decided to stop keeping our patched fork of as most of the patches for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support had been integrated upstream already, and the last one (making FORCE_SOURCE_DATE default to 1) had been refused. So, we are now going to let the archive be rebuilt against unstable's texlive-bin and see how many packages will become unreproducible with this change; once enough data will be collected we will ponder whether FORCE_SOURCE_DATE should be exported by helper tools (such as debhelper) or manually exported by every package that needs it. (For those wondering: we still recommend to follow SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH always and don't recommend other projects to implement FORCE_SOURCE_DATE ) With the drop of texlive-bin we now have only three modified packages in our experimental repository. Reproducible work in other projects Packages fixed The following 12 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: django-floppyforms flask-restful hy jets3t kombu llvm-toolchain-3.8 moap python-bottle python-debtcollector python-django-debug-toolbar python-osprofiler stevedore The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads with reproducibility fixes that currently fail to build: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 36 reviews have been added, 12 have been updated and 31 have been removed in this week. 17 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Dominic Hargreaves. diffoscope development Satyam worked on argument completion (#826711) for diffoscope. strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.019-1~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. reprotest development Ceridwen filed an Intent To Package (ITP) bug for reprotest as #827293. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Mattia Rizzolo, Reiner Herrmann, Ed Maste and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

15 June 2016

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

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

8 June 2016

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

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

22 May 2016

Antonio Terceiro: Adopting pristine-tar

As of yesterday, I am the new maintainer of pristine-tar. As it is the case for most of Joey Hess creations, it is an extremely useful tool, and used in a very large number of Debian packages which are maintained in git. My first upload was most of a terrain recognition nature: I did some housekeeping tasks, such as making the build idempotent and making sure all binaries are built with security hardening flags, and wrote a few automated test cases to serve as build-time and run-time regression test suite. No functional changes have been made. As Joey explained when he orphaned it, there are a few technical challenges involved in making sure pristine-tar stays useful in the future. Although I did read some of the code, I am not particularly familiar with the internals yet, and will be more than happy to get co-maintainers. If you are interested, please get in touch. The source git repository is right there.

20 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 51 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 10th and April 16th 2016: Toolchain fixes Antoine Beaupr suggested that gitpkg stops recording timestamps when creating upstream archives. Antoine Beaupr also pointed out that git-buildpackage diverges from the default gzip settings which is a problem for reproducibly recreating released tarballs which were made using the defaults. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch extending sphinx SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to copyright year. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330, avis, brailleutils, charactermanaj, classycle, commons-io, commons-javaflow, commons-jci, gap-radiroot, jebl2, jetty, libcommons-el-java, libcommons-jxpath-java, libjackson-json-java, libjogl2-java, libmicroba-java, libproxool-java, libregexp-java, mobile-atlas-creator, octave-econometrics, octave-linear-algebra, octave-odepkg, octave-optiminterp, rapidsvn, remotetea, ruby-rinku, tachyon, xhtmlrenderer. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: diffoscope development Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek noted in #820631 that diffoscope doesn't work properly when a file contains several cpio archives. Package reviews 21 reviews have been added, 14 updated and 22 removed in this week. New issue found: timestamps_in_htm_by_gap. Chris Lamb reported 10 new FTBFS issues. Misc. The video and the slides from the talk "Reproducible builds ecosystem" at LibrePlanet 2016 have been published now. This week's edition was written by Lunar and Holger Levsen. h01ger automated the maintenance and publishing of this weekly newsletter via git.

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