Changes in version 0.1.2 (2020-10-07)

• Upgraded to simdjson 0.5.0 (Dirk #49)

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

• installDeps.r installs all dependencies of package (directory or tarball)
• installRSPM.r relies on RSPM to install binary packages
• installBSPM.r relies on BSPM to install binary packages (esp. on Linux)
• cranIncomimg.r checks the incoming queue for one or more packages
• urlUpdates.r checks and/or updates stale URLs leading to redirects

Changes in littler version 0.3.12 (2020-10-04)

• Changes in examples
  • Updates to scripts tt.r, cos.r, cow.r, c4r.r, com.r
  • New script installDeps.r to install dependencies
  • Several updates tp script check.r
  • New script installBSPM.r and installRSPM.r for binary package installation (Dirk and I aki in #81)
  • New script cranIncoming.r to check in Incoming
  • New script urlUpdate.r validates URLs as R does
• Changes in package
  • Travis CI now uses BSPM
  • A package documentation website was added
  • Vignettes now use minidown resulting in much reduced filesizes: from over 800kb to under 50kb (Dirk in #83)

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

Preparing for the race Because it was a special year, and everything was crazy, I actually managed to do more sports than usual, at least up to end of July. So my fitness, and even body weight, was relatively fine, so I subscribed to the mid-distance race (official numbers: 78km distance, 1570 meters altitude), and then off it went to a proper summer vacation in a hotel, even. And while I did do some bike rides during that vacation, from then on my training regime went just off? I did train, I did ride, I did get significant PRs, but it didn t click anymore. Plus, due to well, actually not sure what, work or coffee or something my sleep regime also got completely ruined On top of that, I didn t think about the fact that the race was going to be mid-September, and that high up in the mountains, the weather could have be bad enough (I mean, in 2018 the weather was really bad even in August ) such that I d need to seriously think about clothing.

Race week I arrive in Scuol two days before the race, very tired (I think I got only 6 hours of sleep the night before), and definitely not in a good shape. I was feeling bad enough that I was not quite sure I was going to race. At least weather was OK, such that normal summer clothing would suffice. But the race info was mentioning dangerous segments, to be very careful, etc. etc. so I was quite anxious. Note 1: my wife says, this was not the first time, and likely not the last time that two days before the race I feel like quitting. And as I m currently on-and-off reading the interesting The Brave Athlete: Calm the Fuck Down and Rise to the Occasion book (by Lesley Paterson and Simon Marshall; it s an interesting book, not sure if I recommend it or not), I am beginning to think that this is my reaction to races where I have overshot my usual distance. Or, in general, races where I fear the altitude gain. Not quite sure, but I think it is indeed the actual cause. So I spend Thursday evening feeling unwell, and thinking I ll see how Friday goes. Friday comes, and having slept reasonably well entire night, I pick up my race number, then I take another nap in the afternoon - in total, I ve slept around 13 hours that day. So I felt much better, and was looking forward to the race. Saturday morning comes, I manage to wake up early, and get ready in time; almost didn t panic at all that I m going to be late. Note 2: my wife also says that this is the usual way I behave. Hence, it must be most of it a mental issue, rather than real physical one

Race I reach the train station in time, I get on the train, and by the time the train reached Zernez, I fully calm down. There was am entire hour wait though before the race, and it was quite chilly. Of course I didn t bring anything beside what I was wearing, relying on temperature getting better later in the day. During the wait, there were two interesting things happening. First, we actually got there (in Zernez) before the first people from the long distance passed by, both men and women. Seeing them pass by was cool, thinking they already had ~1 200m altitude in just 30-ish kilometres. The second thing was, as this was the middle and not the shortest distance, the people in the group looked differently than in previous years. More precisely, they were looking very fit, and I was feeling fat. Well, I am overweight, so it was expected, but I was feeling it even more than usual. I think only one or two in ten people were looking as fit as me or less And of course, the pictures post-race show me even less fit-looking than I thought. Ah, self-deception is a sweet thing And yes, we all had to wear masks, up until the last minute. It was interesting, but not actually annoying - and small enough price for being able to race! Then the race starts, and as opposed to many other years, it starts slow. I didn t feel that rush of people starting fast, it was reasonable?

First part of the race (good) Thus started the first part of the race, on a new route that I was unfamiliar with. There was not too much climbing, to be honest, and there was some tricky single-trail through the woods, with lots of the roots. I actually had to get off the bike and push it, since it was too difficult to pedal uphill on that path. Other than that, I was managing so far to adjust my efforts well enough that my usual problems related to climbing (lower back pain) didn t yet appear, even as the overall climbed meters were increasing. I was quite happy at that, and had lots of reserves. To my (pleasant) surprise, two positive things happened:

• I was never alone, a sign that I wasn t too far back.
• I was passing/being passed by people, both on climbs but also on descents! It s rare, but I did overtake a few people on a difficult trail downhill.

With all the back and forth, a few people became familiar (or at least their kit), and it was fun seeing who is better uphill vs. downhill.

And second part (not so good) I finally get to (around) S-chanf, on a very nice but small descent, and on flat roads, and start the normal route for the short race. Something was off though - I knew from past years that these last ~47km have around 700-800m altitude, but I had already done around 1000m. So the promised 1571m were likely to be off, by at least 100-150m. I set myself a new target of 1700m, and adjust my efforts based on that. And then, like clockwork on the 3:00:00 mark, the route exited the forest, the sun got out of the clouds, and the temperature started to increase from 16-17 C to 26 +, with peaks of 31 C. I m not joking: at 2:58:43, temp was 16 , at 3:00:00, it was 18 , at 3:05:45, it was 26 . Heat and climbing are my two nemeses, and after having a pretty good race for the first 3 hours and almost exactly 1200m of climbing, I started feeling quite miserable. Well, it was not all bad. There were some nice stretches of flat, where I knew I can pedal strongly and keep up with other people, until my chain dropped, so I had to stop, re-set it, and lose 2 minutes. Sigh. But, at least, I was familiar with this race, or so I thought. I completely mis-remembered the last ~20km as a two-punch climb, Guarda and Ftan, whereas it is actually a three-punch one: Guarda, Ardez, and only then Ftan. Doesn t help that Ardez has the nice ruins that I was remembering and which threw me off. The saddest part of the day was here, on one of the last climbs - not sure if to Guarda or to Arddez, where a guy overtakes me, and tells me he s glad he finally caught up with me, he almost got me five or six times (!), but I always managed to break off. Always, until now. Now, this was sad (I was huffing and puffing like a steam locomotive now), but also positive, as I never had that before. One good, one bad? And of course, it was more than 1 700m altitude, it was 1 816m. And the descent to Scuol shorter and it didn t end as usual with the small but sharp climb which I just love, due to Covid changes. But, I finished, and without any actual issues, and no dangerous segments as far as I saw. I was anxious for no good reason

Conclusion (or confusion?) So this race was interesting: three hours (to the minute) in which I went 43.5km, climbed 1200m, felt great, and was able to push and push. And then the second part, only ~32km, climbed only 600m, but which felt quite miserable. I don t know if it was mainly heat, mainly my body giving up after that much climbing (or time?), or both. But it s clear that I can t reliably race for more than around these numbers: 3 hours, ~1000+m altitude, in >20 C temperature. One thing that I managed to achieve though: except due to the technically complex trail at the beginning where I pushed the bike, I did not ever stop and push the bike uphill because I was too tired. Instead, I managed (badly) to do the switch sitting/standing as much as I could motivate myself, and thus continue pushing uphill. This is an achievement for me, since mentally it s oh so easy to stop and push the bike, so I was quite glad. As to the race results, they were quite atrocious:

• age category (men), 38 out of 52 finishers, 4h54m, with first finisher doing 3h09m, so 50% slower (!)
• overall (men), 138 out of 173 finishers, with first finisher 2h53m.

These results clearly don t align with my feeling of a good first half of the race, so either it was purely subjective, or maybe in this special year, only really strong people registered for the race, or something else One positive aspect though, compared to most other years, was the consistency of my placement (age and overall):

• Zuoz: 38 / 141
• S-Chanf: 39 / 141
• Zernez: 39 / 141
• Guarda: 38 / 138
• Ftan: 38 / 138
• ( next - whatever this is): 38 / 138
• Finish: 38 / 138

So despite all my ranting above, and all the stats I m pulling out of my own race, it looks like my position in the race was fully settled in the really first part, and I didn t gain nor lose practically anything afterwards. I did dip one place but then gained it back (on the climb to Guarda, even). The split times (per-segment rankings) are a bit more variable, and show that I was actually fast on the climbs but losing speed on the descents, which I really don t understand anymore:

• Zernez-Zuoz (unclear type): 38 / 141
• Zuoz-S-Chanf (unclear type): 40 / 141
• S-Chanf-Zernez (mostly downhill): 39 / 143
• Zernez-Guarda (mostly uphill): 37 / 136
• Guarda-Ftan (mostly uphill): 37 / 131
• Ftan-Scuol (mostly downhill): 43 / 156

The difference at the end is striking. I m visually matching the map positions to km and then use VeloViewer for computing the altitude gain, but Zernez to Guarda is 420m altitude, and Guarda to Ftan is 200m altitude gain, and yet on both, I was faster than my final place, and by quite a few places on overall, only to lose that on the descent (Ftan-Scuol), and by a large margin. So, amongst all the confusion here, I think the story overall is:

• indeed I was quite fit for me, so the climbs were better than my place in the race (if that makes sense).
• however, I m not actually good at climbing nor fit (watts/kg), so I m still way back in the pack (oops!).
• and I do suck at descending, both me (skills) and possible my bike setup as well (too high tyre pressure, etc.) so I lose even more time here

As usual, the final take-away points are: lose the extra weight that is not needed, get better skills, get better core to be better at climbing. I ll finish here with one pic, taken in Guarda (4 hours into the race, more or less):

Climbing in Guarda

Until next year!

This is to say that anyone will be able to independently review Threema s security and verify that the published source code corresponds to the downloaded app.

Events Sadly, due to the unprecedented events in 2020, there will be no in-person Reproducible Builds event this year. However, the Reproducible Builds project intends to resume meeting regularly on IRC, starting on Monday, October 12th at 18:00 UTC (full announcement). The cadence of these meetings will probably be every two weeks, although this will be discussed and decided on at the first meeting. (An editable agenda is available.) On 18th September, Bernhard M. Wiedemann gave a presentation in German titled Wie reproducible builds Software sicherer machen ( How reproducible builds make software more secure ) at the Internet Security Digital Days 2020 conference. (View video.) On Saturday 10th October, Morten Linderud will give a talk at Arch Conf Online 2020 on The State of Reproducible Builds in the Arch Linux distribution:

The previous year has seen great progress in Arch Linux to get reproducible builds in the hands of the users and developers. In this talk we will explore the current tooling that allows users to reproduce packages, the rebuilder software that has been written to check packages and the current issues in this space.

During the Reproducible Builds summit in Marrakesh, GNU Guix, NixOS and Debian were able to produce a bit-for-bit identical binary when building GNU Mes, despite using three different major versions of GCC. Since the summit, additional work resulted in a bit-for-bit identical Mes binary using tcc and this month, a fuller update was posted by the individuals involved.

Development work In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update.

Debian Chris Lamb uploaded a number of Debian packages to address reproducibility issues that he had previously provided patches for, including cfingerd (#831021), grap (#870573), splint (#924003) & schroot (#902804) Last month, an issue was identified where a large number of Debian .buildinfo build certificates had been tainted on the official Debian build servers, as these environments had files underneath the /usr/local/sbin directory to prevent the execution of system services during package builds. However, this month, Aurelien Jarno and Wouter Verhelst fixed this issue in varying ways, resulting in a special policy-rcd-declarative-deny-all package. Building on Chris Lamb s previous work on reproducible builds for Debian .ISO images, Roland Clobus announced his work in progress on making the Debian Live images reproducible. [ ] Lucas Nussbaum performed an archive-wide rebuild of packages to test enabling the reproducible=+fixfilepath Debian build flag by default. Enabling the fixfilepath feature will likely fix reproducibility issues in an estimated 500-700 packages. The test revealed only 33 packages (out of 30,000 in the archive) that fail to build with fixfilepath. Many of those will be fixed when the default LLVM/Clang version is upgraded. 79 reviews of Debian packages were added, 23 were updated and 17 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb added and categorised a number of new issue types, including packages that captures their build path via quicktest.h and absolute build directories in documentation generated by Doxygen , etc. Lastly, Lukas Puehringer s uploaded a new version of the in-toto to Debian which was sponsored by Holger Levsen. [ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds too. In September, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 159 and 160 to Debian:

• New features:
  • Show ordering differences only in strings(1) output by applying the ordering check to all differences across the codebase. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Mark some PGP tests that they require pgpdump, and check that the associated binary is actually installed before attempting to run it. (#969753)
  • Don t raise exceptions when cleaning up after guestfs cleanup failure. [ ]
  • Ensure we check FALLBACK_FILE_EXTENSION_SUFFIX, otherwise we run pgpdump against all files that are recognised by file(1) as data. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Add some documentation for the EXTERNAL_TOOLS dictionary. [ ]
  • Abstract out a variable we use a couple of times. [ ]
• diffoscope.org website improvements:
  • Make the (long) demonstration GIF less prominent on the page. [ ]

In addition, Paul Spooren added support for automatically deploying Docker images. [ ]

Website and documentation This month, a number of updates to the main Reproducible Builds website and related documentation. Chris Lamb made the following changes:

• Update a few titles and the ordering of some top-level navigation elements. [ ]
• Drafted, published and publicised August s monthly report.
• Improve the documentation on how to signup to Salsa. [ ]
• Add some more links to academic papers. [ ]
• Also include the general news in our RSS feed [ ] and drop including weekly reports from the RSS feed (they are never shown now that we have over 10 items) [ ].
• Update ordering and location of various news and links to tarballs, etc. [ ][ ][ ]
• Kept isdebianreproducibleyet.com up to date. [ ]
• Worked with Amateur Radio Digital Communications in order to announce their generous sponsorship of the Reproducible Builds project.

In addition, Holger Levsen re-added the documentation link to the top-level navigation [ ] and documented that the jekyll-polyglot package is required [ ]. Lastly, diffoscope.org and reproducible-builds.org were transferred to Software Freedom Conservancy. Many thanks to Brett Smith from Conservancy, J r my Bobbio (lunar) and Holger Levsen for their help with transferring and to Mattia Rizzolo for initiating this.

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 these patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • cfn-python-lint (build failure)
  • clutter (avoid a random ID in HTML from xsltproc)
  • kubernetes (1-bit order in manual page)
  • libint (merged, filesystem order)
  • libmysofa (disable -fprofile-arcs and code coverage)
  • libnet (merged, date)
  • libqb (date / copyright)
  • libsemigroups (CPU detection)
  • nauty (CPU type detection)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #970024 filed against cif2cell.
  • #970278 filed against smartlist.
  • #970383 filed against evince.
  • #970498 filed against libiio.
  • #970851 filed against check-pgbackrest.
  • #970908 filed against smartdns.
  • #971420 filed against jhbuild.
• kpcyrd:
  • git2-rs (sort return ordering of readdir(3))
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #970874 filed against nix.
  • #970888 & #970890 filed against fai.
  • #970893 filed against debdelta.
  • #971400 & #971402 filed against vboot-utils.
  • #971408 filed against simde.

Bernhard M. Wiedemann also reported issues in git2-rs, pyftpdlib, python-nbclient, python-pyzmq & python-sidpy.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a Jenkins-based testing framework to power tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:

• Debian:
  • Shorten the subject of nodes have gone offline notification emails. [ ]
  • Also track bugs that have been usertagged with usrmerge. [ ]
  • Drop abort-related codepaths as that functionality has been removed from Jenkins. [ ]
  • Update the frequency we update base images and status pages. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Status summary view page:
  • Add support for monitoring systemctl status [ ] and the number of diffoscope processes [ ].
  • Show the total number of nodes [ ] and colourise critical disk space situations [ ].
  • Improve the visuals with respect to vertical space. [ ][ ]
• Debian rebuilder prototype:
  • Resume building random packages again [ ] and update the frequency that packages are rebuilt. [ ][ ]
  • Use --no-respect-build-path parameter until sbuild 0.81 is available. [ ]
  • Treat the inability to locate some packages as a debrebuild problem, and not as a issue with the rebuilder itself. [ ]
• Arch Linux:
  • Update various components to be compatible with Arch Linux s move to the xz compression format. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Allow scheduling of old packages to catch up on the backlog. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve formatting on the summary page. [ ][ ]
  • Update HTML pages once every hour, not every 30 minutes. [ ]
  • Use the Ubuntu (!) GPG keyserver to validate packages. [ ]
• System health checks:
  • Highlight important bad conditions in colour. [ ][ ]
  • Add support for detecting more problems, including Jenkins shutdown issues [ ], failure to upgrade Arch Linux packages [ ], kernels with wrong permissions [ ], etc.
• Misc:
  • Delete old schroot sessions after 2 days, not 3. [ ]
  • Use sudo to cleanup diffoscope schroot sessions. [ ]

In addition, stefan0xC fixed a query for unknown results in the handling of Arch Linux packages [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo updated the template that notifies maintainers by email of their newly-unreproducible packages to ensure that it did not get caught in junk/spam folders [ ]. Finally, build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ].
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
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

Changes in pinp version 0.0.10 (2020-10-01)

• New document_date YAML variable to optionally set a 'Published at' or alike date (Ilya Kashnitsky in #85).
• Small tweaks to README.md (Dirk)
• Support pandoc columns mode (Dirk in #88)

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

.hello   DB "Hello, world\n"
.goodbye DB "Goodbye, world\n"
        mov rdx, 13        ;; write this many characters
        mov rcx, hello     ;; starting at the string
        mov rbx, 1         ;; output is STDOUT
        mov rax, 4         ;; sys_write
        int 0x80           ;; syscall
        mov rdx, 15        ;; write this many characters
        mov rcx, goodbye   ;; starting at the string
        mov rax, 4         ;; sys_write
        mov rbx, 1         ;; output is STDOUT
        int 0x80           ;; syscall
        xor rbx, rbx       ;; exit-code is 0
        xor rax, rax       ;; syscall will be 1 - so set to xero, then increase
        inc rax            ;;
        int 0x80           ;; syscall

        push foo     ; "jmp foo" - indirectly.
        ret
:bar
        nop          ; Nothing happens
        mov rbx,33   ; first syscall argument: exit code
        mov rax,1    ; system call number (sys_exit)
        int 0x80     ; call kernel
:foo
        push bar     ; "jmp bar" - indirectly.
        ret

• https://github.com/skx/assembler/

Curiosity I guess this would be common to most of us. While I grew up, right from the childhood itself, the sky was always an intriguing view. The Stars, the Moon, the Eclipses; were all fascinating. As a child, in my region, religion and culture; the mythology also built up stories around it. Lunar Eclipses have a story of its own. During Solar Eclipses, parents still insist that we do not go out. And to be done with the food eating before/after the eclipse. Then there s the Hindu Astrology part, which claims its own theories and drags in mythology along. For example, you ll still find the Hindu Astrology making recommendations to follow certain practices with the planets, to get auspicious personal results. As far as I know, other religions too have similar beliefs about the planets. As a child, we are told the Moon to be addressed as an Uncle ( ). There s also a rhyme around it, that many of us must have heard. And if you look at our god, Lord Mahadev, he s got a crescent on his head

Lord Mahadev

Reality Fast-forward to today, as I grew, so did some of my understanding. It is fascinating how mankind has achieved so much understanding of our surrounding. You could go through the documentaries on Mars Exploration, for example; to see how the rovers are providing invaluable data. As a mere individual, there s a limit to what one can achieve. But the questions flow in free.

• Is there life beyond us
• What s out there in the sky
• Why is all this the way it is

Hobby The very first step, for me, for every such curiosity, has been to do the ground work, with the resources I have. To study on the subject. I have done this all my life. For example, I started into the Software domain as: A curiosity => A Hobby => A profession Same was the case with some of the other hobbies, equally difficult as Astronomy, that I developed a liking for. Just did the ground work, studied on those topics and then applied the knowledge to further improve it and build up some experience. And star gazing came in no different. As a complete noob, had to start with the A B C on the subject of Astronomy. Familiarize myself with the usual terms. As so on PS: Do keep in mind that not all hobbies have a successful end. For example, I always craved to be good with graphic designing, image processing and the likes, where I ve always failed. Never was able to keep myself motivated enough. Similar was my experience when trying to learn playing a musical instrument. Just didn t work out for me, then. There s also a phase in it, where you fail and then learn from the failures and proceed further, and then eventually succeed. But we all like to talk about the successes. :-)

Astronomy So far, my impression has been that this topic/domain will not suit most of the people. While the initial attraction may be strong, given the complexity and perseverance that Astronomy requires, most people would lose interest in it very soon. Then there s the realization factor. If one goes with an expectation to get quick results, they may get disappointed. It isn t like a point and shoot device that d give you results on the spot. There s also the expectation side of things. If you are a person more accustomed to taking pretty selfies, which always come right because the phone manufacturer does heavy processing on the images to ensure that you get to see the pretty fake self, for the most of the times; then star gazing with telescopes could be a frustrating experience altogether. What you get to see in the images on the internet will be very different than what you d be able to see with your eyes and your basic telescope. There s also the cost aspect. The more powerful (and expensive) your telescope, the better your view. And all things aside, it still may get you lose interest, after you ve done all the ground work and spent a good chunk of money on it. Simply because the object you are gazing at is more a still image, which can quickly get boring for many. On the other hand, if none of the things obstruct, then the domain of Astronomy can be quite fascinating. It is a continuous learning domain (reminds me of CI in our software field these days). It is just the beginning for us here, and we hope to have a lasting experience in it.

The Internet I have been indebted to the internet right from the beginning. The internet is what helped me be able to achieve all I wanted. It is one field with no boundaries. If there is a will, there is a way; and often times, the internet is the way.

• I learnt computers over the internet.
• Learnt more about gardening and plants over the internet
• Learnt more about fish care-taking over the internet

And many many more things. Some of the communities over the internet are a great way to participation. They bridge the age gap, the regional gap and many more. For my Astronomy need, I was glad to see so many active communities, with great participants, on the internet.

Telescope While there are multiple options to start star gazing, I chose to start with a telescope. But as someone completely new to this domain, there was a long way to go. And to add to that, the real life: work + family I spent a good 12+ months reading up on the different types of telescopes, what they are, their differences, their costs, their practical availability etc. The good thing is that the market has offerings for everything. From a very basic binocular to a fully automatic Maksutov-Cassegrain scope. It all would depend on your budget.

Automatic vs Manual To make it easy for the users, the market has multiple options in the offering. One could opt-in for a cheap, basic and manually operated telescope; which would require the user to do a lot of ground study. On the other hand, users also have the option of automatic telescopes which do the hard work of locating and tracking the planetary objects. Either option aside, the end result of how much you ll be able to observe the sky, still depends on many many more factors: Enthusiasm over time, Light Pollution, Clear Skies, Timing etc. PS: The planetary objects move at a steady pace. Objects you lock into your view now will be gone out of the FOV in just a matter of minutes.

My Telescope After spending so much of the time reading up on types of telescopes, my conclusion was that a scope with high aperture and focal length was the way to go forward. This made me shorten the list to Dobsonians. But the Dobsonians aren t a very cheap telescope, whether manual or automatic. My final decision made me acquire a 6" Dobsonian Telescope. It is a Newtonian Reflecting Telescope with a 1200mm focal length and 150mm diameter. Another thing about this subject is that most of the stuff you do in Astronomy; right from the telescope selection, to installation, to star gazing; most of it is DIY, so your mileage may vary with the end result and experience. For me, installation wasn t very difficult. I was able to assemble the base Dobsonian mount and the scope in around 2 hours. But the installation manual, I had been provided with, was very brief. I ended up with one module in the mount wrongly fit, which I was able to fix later, with the help of online forums.

Dobsonian Mount

In this image you can see that the side facing out, where the handle will go, is wrong. If fit this way, the handle will not withstand any weight at all.

Correct Panel Side

The right fix of the handle base board. In this image, the handle is on the other side that I m holding. Because the initial fit put in some damage to the engineered wood, I fixed it up by sealing with some adhesive. With that, this is what my final telescope looks like.

Final Telescope

Clear Skies While the telescope was ready, the skies were not. For almost next 10 days, we had no clear skies at all. All I could do was wait. Wait so much that I had forgotten to check on the skies. Luckily, my wife noticed clear skies this week for a single day. Clear enough that we could try out our telescope for the very first time.

Me posing for a shot

Telescope As I said earlier, in my opinion, it takes a lot of patience and perseverance on this subject. And most of the things here are DIY. To start with, we targeted the Moon. Because it is easy. I pointed the scope to the moon, then looked into the finder scope to center it, and then looked through the eyepiece. And blank. Nothing out there. Turns out, the finder scope and the viewer s angle weren t aligned. This is common and the first DIY step, when you plan to use your telescope for viewing. Since our first attempt was unplanned and just random because we luckily spotted that the skies were clear, we weren t prepared for this. Lucky enough, mapping the difference in the alignment, in the head, is not very difficult. After a couple of minutes, I could make out the point in the finder scope, where the object if projected, would show proper in the viewer. With that done, it was just mesmerizing to see the Moon, in a bit more detail, than what I ve seen all these years of my life.

Moon

Moon

Moon

Moon

The images are not exactly what we saw with our eyes. The view was much more vivid than these pictures. But as a first timer, I really wanted to capture this first moment of a closer view of the Moon. In the whole process; that of ground work studying about telescopes, installation of the telescope, astronomy basics and many other things; the most difficult part in this entire journey, was to point my phone to the viewing eyepiece, to get a shot of the object. This requirement just introduced me to astrophotography. And then, Dobsonians aren t the best model for astrophotography, to what I ve learnt so far. Hopefully, I ll find my ways to do some DIY astrophotography with the tools I have. Or extend my arsenal over time. But overall, we ve been very pleased with the subject of Astronomy. It is a different feel altogether and we re glad to have forayed into it.

• qemu: jessie triage: finish work started in August
• qemu: backport 5 CVE fixes, perform virtual and physical testing, security upload ELA-283-1
• libdbi-perl: global triage: clarifications, confirm incomplete and attempt to get upstream action, request new CVE following discussion with security team
• libdbi-perl: backport 5 CVE fixes, test, security upload ELA-285-1

• qemu: stretch triage, while working on ELTS update; mark several CVEs unaffected, update patch/status
• wordpress: global triage: reference new patches, request proper CVE to fix our temporary tracking
• wordpress: revamp package: upgrade to upstream's stable 4.7.5->4.7.18 to ease future updates, re-apply missing patches, fix past regression and notify maintainer, security upload DLA-2371-1
• libdbi-perl: common work with ELTS, security upload DLA-2386-1
• public IRC team meeting

• LTS/TestSuites/wordpress: new page with testsuite import and manual tests
• LTS/TestSuites/qemu: minor update
• wiki.d.o/Sympa: update Sympa while using it as a libdbi-perl reverse-dep test (update for newer versions, explain how to bootstrap admin access)
• www.d.o/lts/security: import a couple missing announcements and notify uploaders about procedures
• Check status for pdns-recursor, following user request
• Check status for golang-1.7 / CVE-2019-9514 / CVE-2019-9512
• Attempt to improve cooperation after seeing my work discarded and redone as-is, which sadly isn't the first time; no answer
• Historical analysis of our CVE fixes: experiment to gather per-CVE tracker history

Debian

This was my 21st month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/ I ve been busy with my undergraduation stuff but I still squeezed out some time for the regular Debian work. Here are the following things I did in Debian this month:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• rails (2:6.0.3.3+dfsg-1) - Fixing CVE-2020-15169/bug #970040.
• ruby-openid-connect (1.1.8-1) - New upstream version, v1.1.8.
• ruby-mini-magick (4.10.1-1) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #966936.
• ruby-open-graph-reader (0.7.0+dfsg-1) - New upstream version, v0.7.0.
• ruby-string-direction (1.2.2-1) - New upstream version, v1.2.2.
• ruby-jquery-rails (4.3.5-1) - New upstream version, v4.3.5.
• ruby-leaflet-rails (1.6.0+dfsg-1) - New upstream version, v1.6.0.
• ruby-jquery-rails (4.3.5-2) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #956604.
• ruby-rubocop-packaging (0.5.0-1) - Add support for auto-correct.

Other $things:

• Attended the Debian Ruby team meeting. Logs here.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• FTP Trainee reviewing.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.
• Sponsored trace-cmd for Sudip, ruby-asset-sync for Nilesh, and mariadb-mysql-kbs for William.

---

RuboCop::Packaging - Helping the Debian Ruby team! \o/ This Google Summer of Code, I worked on writing a linter that could flag offenses for lines of code that are very troublesome for Debian maintainers while trying to package and maintain Ruby libraries and applications! Whilst the GSoC period is over, I ve been working on improving that tool and have extended that linter to now auto-correct these offenses by itself! \o/
You can now just use the -A flag and you re done! Boom! The ultimate game-changer! Here s a quick demo for this feature: A few quick updates on RuboCop::Packaging:

• Has 4 cops, solving 4 different issues.
• 3 of them support auto-correction. Just use the -A flag.
• 5 releases so far, latest being v0.5.0.
• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/utkarsh2102/rubocop-packaging/
• Release notes: https://github.com/utkarsh2102/rubocop-packaging/releases/
• Documentation: https://docs.rubocop.org/rubocop-packaging/
• Style guide: https://packaging.rubystyle.guide/
• Being used by over 55 projects! \o/

I ve also spent a considerable amount of time in raising awareness about this and in more general sense, about downstream maintenance.
As a result, I raised a bunch of PRs which got really good response. I got all of the 20 PRs merged upstream, fixing these issues.

---

Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my twelfth month as a Debian LTS and third month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 19.75 hours for LTS and 15.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(for LTS, I over-worked for 11 hours last month on the survey so only had 8.75 hours this month!)

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2362-1, fixing CVE-2020-11984, for uwsgi.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.0.14+20161117-3+deb9u3.
• Issued DLA 2363-1, fixing CVE-2020-17446, for asyncpg.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.8.4-1+deb9u1.
• Started working on ruby-kaminari, ruby-rack-cors, and ruby-json-jwt.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 274-1, fixing CVE-2020-11984, for uwsgi.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.0.7-1+deb8u3.
• Issued ELA 275-1, fixing CVE-2020-14363, for libx11.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2:1.6.2-3+deb8u4.
• Issued ELA 278-1, fixing CVE-2020-8184, for ruby-rack.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.5.2-3+deb8u4.
• Also worked on updating the version of clamAV from v0.101.5 to v0.102.4.
  This was a bit tricky package to work on since it involved an ABI/API change and was more or less a transition. Super thanks to Emilio for his invaluable help and him taking over the package, finishing, and uploading it in the end.

Other (E)LTS Work:

• Front-desk duty from 31-08 to 06-09 and from 28-09 onward for both LTS and ELTS.
• Triaged apache2, cryptsetup, nasm, node-bl, plinth, qemu, rsync, ruby-doorkeeper, and uwsgi.
• Marked CVE-2020-15094/symfony as not-affected for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020- 9490,11993 /apache2 as ignored for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-8244/node-bl as no-dsa for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-24978/nasm as no-dsa for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-25073/plinth as no-dsa for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-15094/symfony as not-affected for Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-14382/cryptsetup as not-affected for Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-14387/rsync as not-affected for Jessie.
• Auto EOL ed ark, collabtive, linux, nasm, node-bl, and thunderbird for Jessie.
• Use mktemp instead of tempfile in bin/auto-add-end-of-life.sh.
• Attended the fifth LTS meeting. Logs here.
• General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

---

Until next time.
:wq for today.

• Work on lomiri-app-launch (Debian packaging, upstream work, upload to Debian)
• Fork lomiri-url-dispatcher from url-dispatcher (upstream work)
• Upload lomiri-url-dispatcher to Debian
• Fork out suru-icon-theme and make it its own upstream project
• Package and upload suru-icon-theme to Debian
• First glance at lomiri-ui-toolkit (currently FTBFS, needs to be revisited)
• Update of Mir (1.7.0 -> 1.8.0) in Debian
• Fix net-cpp FTBFS in Debian
• Fix FTBFS in gsettings-qt.
• Fix FTBFS in mir (support of binary-only and arch-indep-only builds)
• Coordinate with Marius Gripsgard and Robert Tari on shift over from Ubuntu Indicator to Ayatana Indicators
• Upload ayatana-indicator-* (and libraries) to Debian (new upstream releases)
• Package and upload to Debian: qmenumodel (still in Debian's NEW queue)
• Package and upload to Debian: ayatana-indicator-sound
• Symbol-Updates (various packages) for non-standard architectures
• Fix FTBFS of qtpim-opensource-src in Debian since Qt5.14 had landed in unstable
• Fix FTBFS on non-standard architectures of qtsystems, qtpim and qtfeedback
• Fix wlcs in Debian (for non-standard architectures), more Symbol-Updates (esp. for the mir DEB package)
• Symbol-Updates (mir, fix upstream tinkering with debian/libmiral3.symbols)
• Fix FTBFS in lomiri-url-dispatcher against Debian unstable, file merge request upstream
• Upstream release of qtmir 0.6.1 (via merge request)
• Improve check_whitespace.py script as used in lomiri-api to ignore debian/ subfolder
• Upstream release of lomiri-api 0.1.1 and upload to Debian unstable.

• UBports: Packaging of Lomiri Operating Environment for Debian (part 02)
• UBports: Packaging of Unity8 Desktop Environment for Debian (part 01)
• DDPO UBports Team: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=team%2Bubports%40tracker.debia...
• DDPO Ayatana Packagers: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-ayatana-devel%40lists.alio...

$ time bgpq4 -h whois.radb.net AS-HURRICANE   wc -l
909869
1.96s user 0.15s system 2% cpu 1:17.64 total
$ time bgpq4 -h rr.ntt.net AS-HURRICANE   wc -l
927865
1.86s user 0.08s system 12% cpu 14.098 total

$ git clone https://github.com/vincentbernat/irrd-legacy.git -b blade/master
$ cd irrd-legacy
$ docker build . -t irrd-snapshot:latest
[ ]
Successfully built 58c3e83a1d18
Successfully tagged irrd-snapshot:latest
$ docker container run --rm --detach --publish=43:43 irrd-snapshot
4879cfe7413075a0c217089dcac91ed356424c6b88808d8fcb01dc00eafcc8c7
$ time bgpq4 -h localhost AS-HURRICANE   wc -l
904137
1.72s user 0.11s system 96% cpu 1.881 total

1. building IRRd,¹
2. retrieving various IRR databases, and
3. assembling the final container with the result of the two previous stages.

$ whois -BrG 2a0a:e805:400::/40
[ ]
inet6num:       2a0a:e805:400::/40
netname:        FR-BLADE-CUSTOMERS-DE
country:        DE
geoloc:         50.1109 8.6821
admin-c:        BN2763-RIPE
tech-c:         BN2763-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED
mnt-by:         fr-blade-1-mnt
remarks:        synced with cmdb
created:        2020-05-19T08:04:58Z
last-modified:  2020-05-19T08:04:58Z
source:         RIPE
route6:         2a0a:e805:400::/40
descr:          Blade IPv6 - AMS1
origin:         AS64476
mnt-by:         fr-blade-1-mnt
remarks:        synced with cmdb
created:        2019-10-01T08:19:34Z
last-modified:  2020-05-19T08:05:00Z
source:         RIPE

$ bgpq4 -6 -S RIPE -b AS64476
NN = [
    2a0a:e805::/40,
    2a0a:e805:100::/40,
    2a0a:e805:300::/40,
    2a0a:e805:400::/40,
    2a0a:e805:500::/40
];

Code The module takes a list of RPSL objects to synchronize and returns the body of an email update if a change is needed:

- name: prepare RIPE objects
  irr_sync:
    irr: RIPE
    mntner: fr-blade-1-mnt
    source: whois-ripe.txt
  register: irr

Prerequisites The source file should be a set of objects to sync using the RPSL language. This would be the same content you would send manually by email. All objects should be managed by the same maintainer, which is also provided as a parameter. Signing and sending the result is not the responsibility of this module. You need two additional tasks for this purpose:

- name: sign RIPE objects
  shell:
    cmd: gpg --batch --user noc@example.com --clearsign
    stdin: "  irr.objects  "
  register: signed
  check_mode: false
  changed_when: false
- name: update RIPE objects by email
  mail:
    subject: "NEW: update for RIPE"
    from: noc@example.com
    to: "auto-dbm@ripe.net"
    cc: noc@example.com
    host: smtp.example.com
    port: 25
    charset: us-ascii
    body: "  signed.stdout  "

You also need to authorize the PGP keys used to sign the updates by creating a key-cert object and adding it as a valid authentication method for the corresponding mntner object:

key-cert:  PGPKEY-A791AAAB
certif:    -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
certif:    
certif:    mQGNBF8TLY8BDADEwP3a6/vRhEERBIaPUAFnr23zKCNt5YhWRZyt50mKq1RmQBBY
[ ]
certif:    -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
mnt-by:    fr-blade-1-mnt
source:    RIPE
mntner:    fr-blade-1-mnt
[ ]
auth:      PGPKEY-A791AAAB
mnt-by:    fr-blade-1-mnt
source:    RIPE

Module definition Starting from the skeleton described in the previous article, we define the module:

module_args = dict(
    irr=dict(type='str', required=True),
    mntner=dict(type='str', required=True),
    source=dict(type='path', required=True),
)
result = dict(
    changed=False,
)
module = AnsibleModule(
    argument_spec=module_args,
    supports_check_mode=True
)

Getting existing objects To grab existing objects, we use the whois command to retrieve all the objects from the provided maintainer.

# Per-IRR variations:
# - whois server
whois =  
    'ARIN': 'rr.arin.net',
    'RIPE': 'whois.ripe.net',
    'APNIC': 'whois.apnic.net'
 
# - whois options
options =  
    'ARIN': ['-r'],
    'RIPE': ['-BrG'],
    'APNIC': ['-BrG']
 
# - objects excluded from synchronization
excluded = ["domain"]
if irr == "ARIN":
    # ARIN does not return these objects
    excluded.extend([
        "key-cert",
        "mntner",
    ])
# Grab existing objects
args = ["-h", whois[irr],
        "-s", irr,
        *options[irr],
        "-i", "mnt-by",
        module.params['mntner']]
proc = subprocess.run("whois", *args, capture_output=True)
if proc.returncode != 0:
    raise AnsibleError(
        f"unable to query whois:  args ")
output = proc.stdout.decode('ascii')
got = extract(output, excluded)

The first part of the code setup some IRR-specific constants: the server to query, the options to provide to the whois command and the objects to exclude from synchronization. The second part invokes the whois command, requesting all objects whose mnt-by field is the provided maintainer. Here is an example of output:

$ whois -h whois.ripe.net -s RIPE -BrG -i mnt-by fr-blade-1-mnt
[ ]
inet6num:       2a0a:e805:300::/40
netname:        FR-BLADE-CUSTOMERS-FR
country:        FR
geoloc:         48.8566 2.3522
admin-c:        BN2763-RIPE
tech-c:         BN2763-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED
mnt-by:         fr-blade-1-mnt
remarks:        synced with cmdb
created:        2020-05-19T08:04:59Z
last-modified:  2020-05-19T08:04:59Z
source:         RIPE
[ ]
route6:         2a0a:e805:300::/40
descr:          Blade IPv6 - PA1
origin:         AS64476
mnt-by:         fr-blade-1-mnt
remarks:        synced with cmdb
created:        2019-10-01T08:19:34Z
last-modified:  2020-05-19T08:05:00Z
source:         RIPE
[ ]

The result is passed to the extract() function. It parses and normalizes the results into a dictionary mapping object names to objects. We store the result in the got variable.

def extract(raw, excluded):
    """Extract objects."""
    # First step, remove comments and unwanted lines
    objects = "\n".join([obj
                         for obj in raw.split("\n")
                         if not obj.startswith((
                                 "#",
                                 "%",
                         ))])
    # Second step, split objects
    objects = [RPSLObject(obj.strip())
               for obj in re.split(r"\n\n+", objects)
               if obj.strip()
               and not obj.startswith(
                   tuple(f" x :" for x in excluded))]
    # Last step, put objects in a dict
    objects =  repr(obj): obj
               for obj in objects 
    return objects

RPSLObject() is a class enabling normalization and comparison of objects. Look at the module code for more details.

>>> output="""
... inet6num:       2a0a:e805:300::/40
... [ ]
... """
>>> pprint( k: str(v) for k,v in extract(output, excluded=[]) )
 '<Object:inet6num:2a0a:e805:300::/40>':
   'inet6num:       2a0a:e805:300::/40\n'
   'netname:        FR-BLADE-CUSTOMERS-FR\n'
   'country:        FR\n'
   'geoloc:         48.8566 2.3522\n'
   'admin-c:        BN2763-RIPE\n'
   'tech-c:         BN2763-RIPE\n'
   'status:         ASSIGNED\n'
   'mnt-by:         fr-blade-1-mnt\n'
   'remarks:        synced with cmdb\n'
   'source:         RIPE',
 '<Object:route6:2a0a:e805:300::/40>':
   'route6:         2a0a:e805:300::/40\n'
   'descr:          Blade IPv6 - PA1\n'
   'origin:         AS64476\n'
   'mnt-by:         fr-blade-1-mnt\n'
   'remarks:        synced with cmdb\n'
   'source:         RIPE' 

Comparing with wanted objects Let s build the wanted dictionary using the same structure, thanks to the extract() function we can use verbatim:

with open(module.params['source']) as f:
    source = f.read()
wanted = extract(source, excluded)

The next step is to compare got and wanted to build the diff object:

if got != wanted:
    result['changed'] = True
    if module._diff:
        result['diff'] = [
            dict(before_header=k,
                 after_header=k,
                 before=str(got.get(k, "")),
                 after=str(wanted.get(k, "")))
            for k in set((*wanted.keys(), *got.keys()))
            if k not in wanted or k not in got or wanted[k] != got[k]]

Returning updates The module does not have a side effect. If there is a difference, we return the updates to send by email. We choose to include all wanted objects in the updates (contained in the source variable) and let the IRR ignore unmodified objects. We also append the objects to be deleted by adding a delete: attribute to each them them.

# We send all source objects and deleted objects.
deleted_mark = f" 'delete:':16 deleted by CMDB"
deleted = "\n\n".join([f" got[k].raw \n deleted_mark "
                       for k in got
                       if k not in wanted])
result['objects'] = f" source \n\n deleted "
module.exit_json(**result)

---

The complete code is available on GitHub. The module supports both --diff and --check flags. It does not return anything if no change is detected. It can work with APNIC, RIPE and ARIN. It is not perfect: it may not detect some changes,³ it is not able to modify objects not owned by the provided maintainer⁴ and some attributes cannot be modified, requiring to manually delete and recreate the updated object.⁵ However, this module should automate 95% of your needs.

---

1. Other IRRs exist without being attached to a RIR. The most notable one is RADb.
2. ARIN is phasing out this method in favor of IRR-online. RIPE has an API available, but email updates are still supported and not planned to be deprecated. APNIC plans to expose an API.
3. For ARIN, we cannot query key-cert and mntner objects and therefore we cannot detect changes in them. It is also not possible to detect changes to the auth mechanisms of a mntner object.
4. APNIC do not assign top-level objects to the maintainer associated with the owner.
5. Changing the status of an inetnum object requires deleting and recreating the object.

Changes in version 0.2.0 (2020-09-27)

• Continuous Integration uses the updated BSPM-based script on Travis and with GitHub Actions (Dirk in #11 plus earlier commits).
• A new default NAMESPACE file is now installed (Dirk in #12).
• A package documentation website was added (Dirk in #13).
• Call tinytest::puppy if installed and not opted out (Dirk in #14).

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

• Travis CI as for example seen in this .travis.yml file (as well as a half dozen more);
• Azure Pipelines for example seen in this azure-pipelines.yml;
• GitHub Actions as for example seen in this R-CMD-check.yaml file.

• downloading run.sh via curl and changing its mode;
• running run.sh bootstrap which sets the operating system default:
  • on Linux we use Ubuntu,
    • add two PPAs repos for R itself and over 4600 r-cran-* binaries,
    • and enable BSPM to use these from install.packages()
  • on macOS we use the standard setup also used on Travis, GitHub Actions and elsewhere;
  • this provides us with fast, reliable, easy, and portable access to binaries on two OSs under dependency resolution;
• running run.sh install_deps to install just the requireded Depends:, Imports: and LinkingTo:
• running run.sh tests to build the tarball and test it via R CMD check --as-cran.

• additional PPAs or drat repos can be added to offer even more package choice;
• alternatively one could run run.sh install_all to also install Suggests:;
• optionally one could run run.sh install_r pkgA pkgB ... to install packages explicitly listed;
• optionally one could also run run.sh install_aptget r-cran-pkga r-cran-pkgb otherpackage to add more Ubuntu binaries.

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

About Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) is a non-profit that was formed to further research and experimentation with digital communications using radio, with a goal of advancing the state of the art of amateur radio and to educate radio operators in these techniques. It does this by managing the allocation of network resources, encouraging research and experimentation with networking protocols and equipment, publishing technical articles and number of other activities to promote the public good of amateur radio and other related fields. ARDC has recently begun to contribute funding to organisations, groups, individuals and projects towards these and related goals, and their grant to the Reproducible Builds project is part of this new initiative. Amateur radio is an entirely volunteer activity performed by knowledgeable hobbyists who have proven their ability by passing the appropriate government examinations. No remuneration is permitted. Ham radio, as it is also known, has proven its value in advancements of the state of the communications arts, as well as in public service during disasters and in times of emergency. For more information about ARDC, please see their website at ampr.org.

About the Reproducible Builds project One of the original promises of open source software was that peer review would result in greater end-user security and stability of our digital ecosystem. However, although it is theoretically possible to inspect and build the original source code in order to avoid maliciously-inserted flaws, almost all software today is distributed in prepackaged form. This disconnect allows third-parties to compromise systems by injecting code into seemingly secure software during the build process, as well as by manipulating copies distributed from app stores and other package repositories. In order to address this, Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices, ideas and tools that create an independently-verifiable path from the original source code, all the way to what is actually running on our machines. Reproducible builds can reveal the injection of backdoors introduced by the hacking of developers own computers, build servers and package repositories, but can also expose where volunteers or companies have been coerced into making changes via blackmail, government order, and so on. A world without reproducible builds is a world where our digital infrastructure cannot be trusted and where online communities are slower to grow, collaborate less and are increasingly fragile. Without reproducible builds, we leave space for greater encroachments on our liberties both by individuals as well as powerful, unaccountable actors such as governments, large corporations and autocratic regimes. The Reproducible Builds project began as a project within the Debian community, but is now working with many crucial and well-known free software projects such as Coreboot, openSUSE, OpenWrt, Tails, GNU Guix, Arch Linux, Tor, and many others. It is now an entirely Linux distribution independent effort and serves as the central clearing house for all issues related to securing build systems and software supply chains of all kinds. For more about the Reproducible Builds project, please see their website at reproducible-builds.org.
If you are interested in ensuring the ongoing security of the software that underpins our civilisation, and wish to sponsor the Reproducible Builds project, please reach out to the project by emailing contact@reproducible-builds.org.