What happened in the
reproducible
builds effort between December 13th to December 19th:
Infrastructure
Niels Thykier
started implementing support for
.buildinfo files in
dak. A very preliminary
commit was made by Ansgar Burchardt to prevent
.buildinfo files from being removed from the upload queue.
Toolchain fixes
- Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper/9.20151219 which sorts files read by
dh_installinit. Patch by Reiner Herrmann.
- Jo Shields uploaded mona/4.2.1.102+dfsg2-4 which lands upstream changes making GUID reproducible in unstable.
- Niko Tyni uploaded perl/5.22.1-1 which makes support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in podlators available in unstable.
Mattia Rizzolo rebased our
experimental debhelper with the changes from the latest upload.
New
fixes have been merged by OCaml upstream.
Packages fixed
The following 39 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
apache-mime4j,
avahi-sharp,
blam,
bless,
cecil-flowanalysis,
cecil,
coco-cs,
cowbell,
cppformat,
dbus-sharp-glib,
dbus-sharp,
gdcm,
gnome-keyring-sharp,
gudev-sharp-1.0,
jackson-annotations,
jackson-core,
jboss-classfilewriter,
jboss-jdeparser2,
jetty8,
json-spirit,
lat,
leveldb-sharp,
libdecentxml-java,
libjavaewah-java,
libkarma,
mono.reflection,
monobristol,
nuget,
pinta,
snakeyaml,
taglib-sharp,
tangerine,
themonospot,
tomboy-latex,
widemargin,
wordpress,
xsddiagram,
xsp,
zeitgeist-sharp.
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:
- #807837 on lxc by Reiner Herrmann: use time of latest
debian/changelog entry for LXC_GENERATE_DATE.
- #807838 on graphite2 by Reiner Herrmann: tell dblatex to use a static path.
- #808032 on python-genpy by Chris Lamb: sort list of generated modules.
- #808388 on buzztrax by Chris Lamb: implement support for
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
reproducible.debian.net
Packages in
experimental are now tested on
armhf. (h01ger)
Arch Linux packages in the
multilib and
community repositories (4,000 more source packages) are also being tested. All of these test results are better analyzed and
nicely displayed together with each package. (h01ger)
For Fedora, build jobs can now run in parallel. Two are currently running, now testing reproducibility of 785 source packages from Fedora 23.
mock/1.2.3-1.1 has been uploaded to experimental to better build RPMs. (h01ger)
Work has started on having
automatic build node pools to maximize use of
armhf build nodes. (Vagrant Cascadian)
diffoscope development
Version 43 has been
released on December 15th. It has been dubbed as
epic! as it contains many contributions that were written around the
summit in Athens.
Baptiste Daroussin found that running diffoscope on some Tar archives could overwrite arbitrary files. This has been fixed by using
libarchive instead of Python internal Tar library and adding a sanity check for destination paths. In any cases, until proper sandboxing is implemented, don't run diffosope on unstrusted inputs outside an isolated, throw-away system.
Mike Hommey identified that the CBFS comparator would needlessly waste time scanning big files. It will now not consider any files bigger than 24 MiB 8 MiB more than the largest ROM created by
coreboot at this time. An
encoding issue related to Zip files has also been fixed. (Lunar)
New comparators have been added: Android dex files (Reiner Herrmann), filesystem images using
libguestfs (Reiner Herrmann), icons and JPEG images using
libcaca (Chris Lamb), and OS X binaries (Clemens Lang). The comparator for Free Pascal Compilation Unit will now only be used when the unit version matches the compiler one. (Levente Polyak)
A new multi-file HTML output with on-demand loading of long diffs is available through the
--html-dir option. On-demand loading requires
jQuery which path can be specified through the
--jquery option. The diffs can also be simply browsed for non-JavaScript users or when jQuery is not available. (Joachim Breitner)
Portability toward other systems has been improved: old versions of GNU diff are now supported (Mike McQuaid), suggestion of the appropriate locale is now the more generic
en_US.UTF-8 (Ed Maste), the
--list-tools option can now support multiple systems (Mattia Rizzolo, Levente Polyak, Lunar).
Many internal changes and code clean-ups have been made, paving the way for parallel processing. (Lunar)
Version 44 was
released on December 18th fixing an
issue affecting
.deb lacking a
md5sums file introduced in a previous refactoring (Lunar). Support has been added for Mozilla optimized Zip files. (Mike Hommey). The HTML output has been optimized in size (Mike Hommey, Esa Peuha, Lunar), speed (Lunar), and will now properly number lines (Mike Hommey). A message will always be displayed when lines are ignored at the end of a diff (Lunar). For portability and consistency, Python
os.walk() function is now used instead of
find to perform directory listing. (Lunar)
Documentation update
Package reviews
143
reviews have been removed, 69 added and 22 updated in the previous week.
Chris Lamb reported 12 new FTBFS issues.
News issues identified this week:
random_order_in_init_py_generated_by_python-genpy,
timestamps_in_copyright_added_by_perl_dist_zilla,
random_contents_in_dat_files_generated_by_chasen-dictutils_makemat,
timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_pandoc.
Chris West did some improvements on the scripts used to manage notes in the
misc repository.
Misc.
Accounts of the
reproducible builds summit in Athens were written by
Thomas Klausner from NetBSD and
Hans-Christoph Steiner from The Guardian Project.
Some openSUSE developers are working on a
hackweek on reproducible builds which was discussed on the
opensuse-packaging mailing-list.
With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian.
Ian started the Debian project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later that same year. Debian would go on to become the world's Universal Operating System, running on everything from embedded devices to the space station.
Ian's sharp focus was on creating a Distribution and community culture that did the right thing, be it ethically, or technically. Releases went out when they were ready, and the project's staunch stance on Software Freedom are the gold standards in the Free and Open Source world.
Ian's devotion to the right thing guided his work, both in Debian and in the subsequent years, always working towards the best possible future.
Ian's dream has lived on, the Debian community remains incredibly active, with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the world a reliable and secure operating system.
The thoughts of the Debian Community are with Ian's family in this hard time.
His family has asked for privacy during this difficult time and we very much wish to respect that. Within our Debian and the larger Linux community condolences may be sent to in-memoriam-ian@debian.org where they will be kept and archived.
the upload of perl 5.22 to unstable some days ago provided ample opportunity
to fix some new RC bugs. here's the list of my work:
It was a shock to be back in Finland after five years. The country had
gone bad.
I was born in Finland, and lived here all my life, until
January, 2010. I then moved abroad for five years, with my
then-girlfriend, now wife. We lived in New Zealand, Scotland, and
England. In October 2014 we came back, because my next job happened to
be in Finland.
When we came back, I found that the country had changed, or I had lost
my rose-coloured glasses. The Finland I left was a place where
equality and solidarity were assumed, though not universal. The
country I came back to turned out to be racist, scared, and quickly
abandoning everything that used to be examples of why the country is a
good place to live. Some of the change has, possibly, only happened
during 2015 and the refugee crisis in Europe, but the change started
earlier.
Examples:
Performance for patching compressed files
Contents files are usually compressed with gzip, and kept compressed locally because they are about 500 MB uncompressed and only 30MB compressed. I profiled this, and it turns out there is not much we can do about it: The majority of the time is spent inside zlib, mostly combining CRC checksums:
Going forward, I think a reasonable option might be to recompress Contents files using lzo they will be a bit bigger (50MB instead of 30MB), but lzo is about 6 times as fast (compressing a 430MB Contents file took 1 second instead of 6).
(This is just a copy of 
# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2015-12-21 15:00+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
#. type: Title #
#, no-wrap
msgid "I want your input"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
#, no-wrap
msgid "\n"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
#, no-wrap
msgid "\n"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid "You want to share an opinion with me, or raise a question?"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid "Great, please do: I love exchanging opinions and ideas."
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid ""
"You can [contact me discretely][]. Please consider, however, to speak in "
"public instead, allowing others to benefit from our exchange."
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid ""
"Don't worry if it is interesting to others - the World is big and someone "
"somewhere always cares!"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid "[contact me discretely]:"
msgstr ""
#. type: Title ##
#, no-wrap
msgid "Email - encourages reflection"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid "Post to a public mailinglist."
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid ""
"If uncertain that I am subscribed to the list, or if you want my special "
"attention (but think twice if that's really needed!), add my [private "
"mail](mailto:dr@jones.dk) as cc."
msgstr ""
#. type: Title ##
#, no-wrap
msgid "Chat - more casual"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid ""
"I am also [reachable via chat][]. Chat is nice for shorter "
"questions/comments, and when you need to discuss what you want to say at "
"all."
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain text
msgid "[reachable via chat]:"
msgstr ""
#. type: Title ##
#, no-wrap
msgid "Blog - best for reuse"
msgstr ""
TeleLaunchTwo A Smaller Wireless Launch Controller
I've built a wireless launch control system for NAR and OROC. Those
are both complex systems with a single controller capable of running
hundreds of pads. And, it's also complicated to build, with each board
hand-made by elves in our Portland facility (aka, my office).
A bunch of people have asked for something simpler, but using the same
AES-secured two-way wireless communications link, so I decided to just
build something and see if we couldn't eventually come up with
something useful. I think if there's enough interest, I can get some
boards built for reasonable money.
Here's a picture of the system; you can see the LCO end in a box
behind the pad end sitting on the bench.
Today was a nice day with a surprising number of early Christmas presents:
