OSM data is used for the road network, traffic signs and signals, buildings, natural features, landuse polygons and some POIs.

1. Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced
2. GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility
3. New reproducibility-related academic papers
4. Misc development news
5. Website updates
6. Reproducibility testing framework

Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced We are very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility Vagrant Cascadian will be holding a Reproducible Builds session as part of the monthly Guix patch review series on July 11th at 17:00 UTC. These online events are intended to encourage everyone everyone becoming a patch reviewer and the goal of reviewing patches is to help Guix project accept contributions while maintaining our quality standards and learning how to do patch reviews together in a friendly hacking session.

New reproducibility-related academic papers Multiple scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds were published this month: An Industry Interview Study of Software Signing for Supply Chain Security was published by Kelechi G. Kalu, Tanmay Singla, Chinenye Okafor, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis of Electrical and Computer Engineering department of Purdue University, Indiana, USA, and is concerned with:

To understand software signing in practice, we interviewed 18 high-ranking industry practitioners across 13 organizations. We provide possible impacts of experienced software supply chain failures, security standards, and regulations on software signing adoption. We also study the challenges that affect an effective software signing implementation.

DiVerify: Diversifying Identity Verification in Next-Generation Software Signing was written by Chinenye L. Okafor, James C. Davis and Santiago Torres-Arias also of Purdue University and is interested in:

Code signing enables software developers to digitally sign their code using cryptographic keys, thereby associating the code to their identity. This allows users to verify the authenticity and integrity of the software, ensuring it has not been tampered with. Next-generation software signing such as Sigstore and OpenPubKey simplify code signing by providing streamlined mechanisms to verify and link signer identities to the public key. However, their designs have vulnerabilities: reliance on an identity provider introduces a single point of failure, and the failure to follow the principle of least privilege on the client side increases security risks. We introduce Diverse Identity Verification (DiVerify) scheme, which strengthens the security guarantees of next-generation software signing by leveraging threshold identity validations and scope mechanisms.

Felix Lagn hed published their thesis on the Integration of Reproducibility Verification with Diffoscope in GNU Make. This work, amongst some other results:

[ ] resulted in an extension of GNU make which is called rmake, where diffoscope a tool for detecting differences between a large number of file types was integrated into the workflow of make. rmake was later used to answer the posed research questions for this thesis. We found that different build paths and offsets are a big problem as three out of three tested Free and Open Source Software projects all contained these variations. The results also showed that gcc s optimisation levels did not affect reproducibility, but link-time optimisation embeds a lot of unreproducible information in build artefacts. Lastly, the results showed that build paths, build ID s and randomness are the three most common groups of variations encountered in the wild and potential solutions for some variations were proposed.

Lastly, Pol Dellaiera completed his master thesis on Reproducibility in Software Engineering at the University of Mons, Belgium, under the supervision of Dr. Tom Mens, professor and director of the Software Engineering Lab.

The thesis serves as an introduction to the concept of reproducibility in software engineering, offering a comprehensive overview of formalizations using mathematical notations for key concepts and an empirical evaluation of several key tools. By exploring various case studies, methodologies and tools, the research aims to provide actionable insights for practitioners and researchers alike.

Development news In Debian this month, 4 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 14 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Only one issue types was updated, though, explaining that we don t vary the build path anymore.
On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote that whilst he had previously collected issues that introduce non-determinism he has now moved on to discuss about mitigations , in the sense of how can we avoid whole categories of problem without patching an infinite number of individual packages . In addition, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen announced the release of two versions of GNU Mes. [ ][ ]
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.
In NixOS, with the 24.05 release out, it was again validated that our minimal ISO is reproducible by building it on a virtual machine with no access to the binary cache.
What s more, we continued to write patches in order to fix specific reproducibility issues, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann writing three patches (for qutebrowser, samba and systemd), Chris Lamb filing Debian bug #1074214 against the fastfetch package and Arnout Engelen proposing fixes to refind and for the Scala compiler [ .
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded two versions (270 and 271) to Debian, and made the following changes as well:

• Drop Build-Depends on liblz4-tool in order to fix Debian bug #1072575. [ ]
• Update tests to support zipdetails version 4.004 that is shipped with Perl 5.40. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Akihiro Suda very helpfully making the <h4> elements more distinguishable from the <h3> level [ ][ ] as well as adding a guide for Dockerfile reproducibility [ ]. In addition Fay Stegerman added two tools, apksigcopier and reproducible-apk-tools, to our Tools page.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

• Marking the virt(32 64)c-armhf nodes as down. [ ]
• Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node in order to debug a regression on the ppc64el architecture. [ ]
• Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node. [ ][ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo re-aligned the /etc/default/jenkins file with changes performed upstream [ ] and changed how configuration files are handled on the rb-mail1 host. [ ], whilst Vagrant Cascadian documented the failure of the virt32c and virt64c nodes after initial investigation [ ].

---

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.
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• gt: fix manual page
• Debian wiki pages: CopyrightReviewTools, MassRebuilds, PortsDocs/New, Teams/DPL/New

Issues

• Conffile removal in apparmor
• Features in KDE, rss-blogroll-network
• Warnings in python3-azure, python3-commonmark-bkrs

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on IRC

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

1. A peek into build provenance for Homebrew
2. Distribution news
3. Mailing list news
4. Miscellaneous news
5. Two new academic papers
6. diffoscope
7. Website updates
8. Upstream patches
9. Reproducibility testing framework

A peek into build provenance for Homebrew Joe Sweeney and William Woodruff on the Trail of Bits blog wrote an extensive post about build provenance for Homebrew, the third-party package manager for MacOS. Their post details how each bottle (i.e. each release):

[ ] built by Homebrew will come with a cryptographically verifiable statement binding the bottle s content to the specific workflow and other build-time metadata that produced it. [ ] In effect, this injects greater transparency into the Homebrew build process, and diminishes the threat posed by a compromised or malicious insider by making it impossible to trick ordinary users into installing non-CI-built bottles.

The post also briefly touches on future work, including work on source provenance:

Homebrew s formulae already hash-pin their source artifacts, but we can go a step further and additionally assert that source artifacts are produced by the repository (or other signing identity) that s latent in their URL or otherwise embedded into the formula specification.

Distribution news In Debian this month, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (aka josch) noticed that the Debian binary package bash version 5.2.15-2+b3 was uploaded to the archive twice. Once to bookworm and once to sid but with differing content. This is problem for reproducible builds in Debian due its assumption that the package name, version and architecture triplet is unique. However, josch highlighted that

This example with bash is especially problematic since bash is Essential:yes, so there will now be a large portion of .buildinfo files where it is not possible to figure out with which of the two differing bash packages the sources were compiled.

In response to this, Holger Levsen performed an analysis of all .buildinfo files and found that this needs almost 1,500 binNMUs to fix the fallout from this bug. Elsewhere in Debian, Vagrant Cascadian posted about a Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU) sprint to take place during early June, and it was announced that there is now a #debian-snapshot IRC channel on OFTC to discuss the creation of a new source code archiving service to, perhaps, replace snapshot.debian.org. Lastly, 11 reviews of Debian packages were added, 15 were updated and 48 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated by Chris Lamb as well. [ ][ ]
Elsewhere in the world of distributions, deep within a larger announcement from Colin Percival about the release of version 14.1-BETA2, it was mentioned that the FreeBSD kernels are now built reproducibly.
In Fedora, however, the change proposal mentioned in our report for April 2024 was approved, so, per the ReproduciblePackageBuilds wiki page, the add-determinism tool is now running in new builds for Fedora 41 ( rawhide ). The add-determinism tool is a Rust program which, as its name suggests, adds determinism to files that are given as input by attempting to standardize metadata contained in binary or source files to ensure consistency and clamping to $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in all instances . This is essentially the Fedora version of Debian s strip-nondeterminism. However, strip-nondeterminism is written in Perl, and Fedora did not want to pull Perl in the buildroot for every package. The add-determinism tool eliminates many causes of non-determinism and work is ongoing to continue the scope of packages it can operate on.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month, regular contributor kpcyrd wrote to the list with an update on their source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. The whatsrc.org project, which was launched last month in response to the XZ Utils backdoor, now contains and indexes almost 250,000 unique source code archives. In their post, kpcyrd gives an example of its intended purpose, noting that it shown that whilst there seems to be consensus about [the] source code for zsh 5.9 in various Linux distributions, it does not align with the contents of the zsh Git repository . Holger Levsen also posted to the list with a pre-announcement of sorts for the 2024 Reproducible Builds summit. In particular:

[Whilst] the dates and location are not fixed yet, however if you don help us with finding a suitable location soon, it is very likely that we ll meet again in Hamburg in the 2nd half of September 2024 [ ].

Lastly, Frederic-Emmanuel Picca wrote to the list asking for help understanding the non-reproducible status of the Debian silx package and received replies from both Vagrant Cascadian and Chris Lamb.

Miscellaneous news strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. This month strip-nondeterminism version 1.14.0-1 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb chiefly to incorporate a change from Alex Muntada to avoid a dependency on Sub::Override to perform monkey-patching and break circular dependencies related to debhelper [ ]. Elsewhere in our tooling, Jelle van der Waa modified reprotest because the pipes module will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].
It was also noticed that a new blog post by Daniel Stenberg detailing How to verify a Curl release mentions the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable. This is because:

The [curl] release tools document also contains another key component: the exact time stamp at which the release was done using integer second resolution. In order to generate a correct tarball clone, you need to also generate the new version using the old version s timestamp. Because the modification date of all files in the produced tarball will be set to this timestamp.

Furthermore, Fay Stegerman filed a bug against the Signal messenger app for Android to report that their reproducible builds cannot, in fact, be reproduced. However, Fay is quick to note that she has:

found zero evidence of any kind of compromise. Some differences are yet unexplained but everything I found seems to be benign. I am disappointed that Reproducible Builds have been broken for months but I have zero reason to doubt Signal s security in any way.

Lastly, it was observed that there was a concise and diagrammatic overview of supply chain threats on the SLSA website.

Two new academic papers Two new scholarly papers were published this month. Firstly, Mathieu Acher, Beno t Combemale, Georges Aaron Randrianaina and Jean-Marc J z quel of University of Rennes on Embracing Deep Variability For Reproducibility & Replicability. The authors describe their approach as follows:

In this short [vision] paper we delve into the application of software engineering techniques, specifically variability management, to systematically identify and explicit points of variability that may give rise to reproducibility issues (e.g., language, libraries, compiler, virtual machine, OS, environment variables, etc.). The primary objectives are: i) gaining insights into the variability layers and their possible interactions, ii) capturing and documenting configurations for the sake of reproducibility, and iii) exploring diverse configurations to replicate, and hence validate and ensure the robustness of results. By adopting these methodologies, we aim to address the complexities associated with reproducibility and replicability in modern software systems and environments, facilitating a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on these critical aspects.

(A PDF of this article is available.)
Secondly, Ludovic Court s, Timothy Sample, Simon Tournier and Stefano Zacchiroli have collaborated to publish a paper on Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment. Their paper was motivated because:

The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.

(A PDF of this article is also available.)

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 266, 267, 268 and 269 to Debian, making the following changes:

• New features:
  • Use xz --list to supplement output when comparing .xz archives; essential when metadata differs. (#1069329)
  • Include xz --verbose --verbose (ie. double) output. (#1069329)
  • Strip the first line from the xz --list output. [ ]
  • Only include xz --list --verbose output if the xz has no other differences. [ ]
  • Actually append the xz --list after the container differences, as it simplifies a lot. [ ]
• Testing improvements:
  • Allow Debian testing to fail right now. [ ]
  • Drop apktool from Build-Depends; we can still test APK functionality via autopkgtests. (#1071410)
  • Add a versioned dependency for at least version 5.4.5 for the xz tests as they fail under (at least) version 5.2.8. (#374)
  • Fix tests for 7zip 24.05. [ ][ ]
  • Fix all tests after additon of xz --list. [ ][ ]
• Misc:
  • Update copyright years. [ ]

In addition, James Addison fixed an issue where the HTML output showed only the first difference in a file, while the text output shows all differences [ ][ ][ ], Sergei Trofimovich amended the 7zip version test for older 7z versions that include the string [64] [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian relaxed the versioned dependency to allow version 5.4.1 for the xz tests [ ] and proposed updates to guix for versions 267, 268 and pushed version 269 to Guix. Furthermore, Eli Schwartz updated the diffoscope.org website in order to explain how to install diffoscope on Gentoo [ ].

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb making the print CSS stylesheet nicer [ ]. Fay Stegerman made a number of updates to the page about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ][ ][ ] and Holger Levsen added some of their presentations to the Resources page. Furthermore, IOhannes zm lnig stipulated support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in clang version 16.0.0+ [ ], Jan Zerebecki expanded the Formal definition page and fixed a number of typos on the Buy-in page [ ] and Simon Josefsson fixed the link to Trisquel GNU/Linux on the Projects page [ ].

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a number of patches to fix specific reproducibility issues, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • nauty (CPU-detection issue)
  • emacs (ASLR)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1070754 filed against gensio.
  • #1071064 filed against tkgate.
  • #1072094 filed against ruby-pgplot.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Enable the rebuilder-snapshot API on osuosl4. [ ]
  • Schedule the i386 architecture a bit more often. [ ]
  • Adapt cleanup_nodes.sh to the new way of running our build services. [ ]
  • Add 8 more workers for the i386 architecture. [ ]
  • Update configuration now that the infom07 and infom08 nodes have been reinstalled as real i386 systems. [ ]
  • Make diffoscope timeouts more visible on the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ]
  • Mark the cbxi4a-armhf node as down. [ ][ ]
  • Only install the hdmi2usb-mode-switch package only on Debian bookworm and earlier [ ] and only install the haskell-platform package on Debian bullseye [ ].
• Misc:
  • Install the ntpdate utility as we need it later. [ ]
  • Document the progress on the i386 architecture nodes at Infomaniak. [ ]
  • Drop an outdated and unnoticed notice. [ ]
  • Add live_setup_schroot to the list of so-called zombie jobs. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo reinstalled the infom07 and infom08 nodes [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4a node as online [ ].

---

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

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• ulfius: fix uwsc quiet mode
• duck: add indicators of obsolete sites (1 2)
• Debian BTS usertags: fix buildd, porter, derivatives, BSP tags
• Debian wiki pages: ArchiveQualification/loong64, BSP, DebianEvents/de/2024/FrOSCon19, DebianUnstable, Firmware/Open, HardwareQualification/riscv64, Kubernetes, Packaging/Pre-Requisites/nspawn, Ports/loong64, Ports/riscv64, Python3-six-removal, Sparc64, Teams/Cloud, WhyTheName, rt.debian.org

Issues

• Incorrect URL in fracatux
• Features in socat, lintian, KDE Plasma Shell
• Warnings in pyasn, onionshare-cli, osc
• Broken manual page in jbig2
• Incorrect EOF handling in ncat

Review

• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Administration

• Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

> library(ulid)
> gen_ulid <- \(sleep) replicate(5,  Sys.sleep(sleep); generate() )
> u <- gen_ulid(.1)
> df <- unmarshal(u)
> data.table::data.table(df)
                        ts              rnd
                    <POSc>           <char>
1: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.588 CSQAJBPNX75R0G5A
2: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.688 XZX0TREDHD6PC1YR
3: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.789 0YK9GKZVTED27QMK
4: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.890 SC3M3G6KGPH7S50S
5: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.990 TSKCBWJ3TEKCPBY0
>

Changes in version 0.4.0 (2024-06-03)

• Switch two functions to fork by Chris Bove using std::chrono instead of time_t for consistent millisecond resolution (#3 fixing #2)
• Updated documentation showing consistent millisecond functionality
• Added unit tests for millisecond functionality

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

Why These Issues Are Created As both a producer and consumer of open source software, I completely understand the reasons someone might want to know whether a project is abandoned. It s comforting to be able to believe that there s someone on the other end of the line , and that if you have a problem, you can ask for help with a non-zero chance of someone answering you. There s also a better chance that, if the maintainer is still interested in the software, that compatibility issues and at least show-stopper bugs might get fixed for you. But often there s more at play. There is a delusion that maintained open source software comes with entitlements an expectation that your questions, bug reports, and feature requests will be attended to in some fashion. This comes about, I think, in part because there are a lot of open source projects that are energetically supported, where generous volunteers do answer questions, fix reported bugs, and implement things that they don t personally need, but which random Internet strangers ask for. If you ve had that kind of user experience, it s not surprising that you might start to expect it from all open source projects. Of course, these wonders of cooperative collaboration are the exception, rather than the rule. In many (most?) cases, there is little practical difference between most projects that are maintained and those that are formally declared unmaintained . The contributors (or, most often, contributor singular) are unlikely to have the time or inclination to respond to your questions in a timely and effective manner. If you find a problem with the software, you re going to be paddling your own canoe, even if the maintainer swears that they re still maintaining it.

A Thought Appears With this in mind, I ve been considering how to get ahead of the problem and answer the question for the software projects I ve put out in the world. Nothing I ve built has anything like what you d call a community ; most have never seen an external PR, or even an issue. The last commit date on them might be years ago. By most measures, almost all of my repos look unmaintained . Yet, they don t feel unmaintained to me. I m still using the code, sometimes as often as every day, and if something broke for me, I d fix it. Anyone who needs the functionality I ve developed can use the code, and be pretty confident that it ll do what it says in the README. I m considering creating an issue in all my repos, titled Is This Project Still Maintained? , pinning it to the issues list, and pasting in something I m starting to think of as The Open Source Maintainer s Manifesto . It goes something like this:

Is This Project Still Maintained? Yes. Maybe. Actually, perhaps no. Well, really, it depends on what you mean by maintained . I wrote the software in this repo for my own benefit to solve the problems I had, when I had them. While I could have kept the software to myself, I instead released it publicly, under the terms of an open licence, with the hope that it might be useful to others, but with no guarantees of any kind. Thanks to the generosity of others, it costs me literally nothing for you to use, modify, and redistribute this project, so have at it!

OK, Whatever. What About Maintenance? In one sense, this software is maintained , and always will be. I fix the bugs that annoy me, I upgrade dependencies when not doing so causes me problems, and I add features that I need. To the degree that any on-going development is happening, it s because I want that development to happen. However, if maintained to you means responses to questions, bug fixes, upgrades, or new features, you may be somewhat disappointed. That s not maintenance , that s support , and if you expect support, you ll probably want to have a support contract , where we come to an agreement where you pay me money, and I help you with the things you need help with.

That Doesn t Sound Fair! If it makes you feel better, there are several things you are entitled to:

1. The ability to use, study, modify, and redistribute the contents of this repository, under the terms stated in the applicable licence(s).
2. That any interactions you may have with myself, other contributors, and anyone else in this project s spaces will be in line with the published Code of Conduct, and any transgressions of the Code of Conduct will be dealt with appropriately.
3. actually, that s it.

Things that you are not entitled to include an answer to your question, a fix for your bug, an implementation of your feature request, or a merge (or even review) of your pull request. Sometimes I may respond, either immediately or at some time long afterwards. You may luck out, and I ll think hmm, yeah, that s an interesting thing and I ll work on it, but if I do that in any particular instance, it does not create an entitlement that I will continue to do so, or that I will ever do so again in the future.

But I ve Found a Huge and Terrible Bug! You have my full and complete sympathy. It s reasonable to assume that I haven t come across the same bug, or at least that it doesn t bother me, otherwise I d have fixed it for myself. Feel free to report it, if only to warn other people that there is a huge bug they might need to avoid (possibly by not using the software at all). Well-written bug reports are great contributions, and I appreciate the effort you ve put in, but the work that you ve done on your bug report still doesn t create any entitlement on me to fix it. If you really want that bug fixed, the source is available, and the licence gives you the right to modify it as you see fit. I encourage you to dig in and fix the bug. If you don t have the necessary skills to do so yourself, you can get someone else to fix it everyone has the same entitlements to use, study, modify, and redistribute as you do. You may also decide to pay me for a support contract, and get the bug fixed that way. That gets the bug fixed for everyone, and gives you the bonus warm fuzzies of contributing to the digital commons, which is always nice.

But My PR is a Gift! If you take the time and effort to make a PR, you re doing good work and I commend you for it. However, that doesn t mean I ll necessarily merge it into this repository, or even work with you to get it into a state suitable for merging. A PR is what is often called a gift of work . I ll have to make sure that, at the very least, it doesn t make anything actively worse. That includes introducing bugs, or causing maintenance headaches in the future (which includes my getting irrationally angry at indenting, because I m like that). Properly reviewing a PR takes me at least as much time as it would take me to write it from scratch, in almost all cases. So, if your PR languishes, it might not be that it s bad, or that the project is (dum dum dummmm!) unmaintained , but just that I don t accept this particular gift of work at this particular time. Don t forget that the terms of licence include permission to redistribute modified versions of the code I ve released. If you think your PR is all that and a bag of potato chips, fork away! I won t be offended if you decide to release a permanent fork of this software, as long as you comply with the terms of the licence(s) involved. (Note that I do not undertake support contracts solely to review and merge PRs; that reeks a little too much of pay to play for my liking)

Gee, You Sound Like an Asshole I prefer to think of myself as forthright and plain-speaking , but that brings to mind that third thing you re entitled to: your opinion. I ve written this out because I feel like clarifying the reality we re living in, in the hope that it prevents misunderstandings. If what I ve written makes you not want to use the software I ve written, that s fine you ve probably avoided future disappointment.

Opinions Sought What do you think? Too harsh? Too wishy-washy? Comment away!

Who s Joining the Fun? We re excited to welcome participants from various backgrounds, including:

• GPU hardware vendors;
• Linux distributions;
• Linux desktop environments and compositors;
• Color experts, researchers and enthusiasts;

This diverse mix of backgrounds are represented by developers from several companies working on the Linux display stack: AMD, Arm, BlueSystems, Bootlin, Collabora, Google, GravityXR, Igalia, Intel, LittleCMS, Qualcomm, Raspberry Pi, RedHat, SUSE, and System76. It ll ensure a dynamic exchange of perspectives and foster collaboration across the Linux Display community. Please take a look at the list of participants for more info.

What s on the Agenda? The beauty of the hackfest is that the agenda is driven by participants! As this is a hybrid event, we decided to improve the experience for remote participants by creating a dedicated space for them to propose topics and some introductory talks in advance. From those inputs, we defined a schedule that reflects the collective interests of the group, but is still open for amendments and new proposals. Find the schedule details in the official event webpage. Expect discussions on:

KMS Color/HDR

• Proposal with new DRM object type:
  • Brief presentation of GPU-vendor features;
  • Status update of plane color management pipeline per vendor on Linux;
• HDR/Color Use-cases:
  • HDR gainmap images and how should we think about HDR;
  • Google/ChromeOS GFX view about HDR/per-plane color management, VKMS and lessons learned;
• Post-blending Color Pipeline.
• Color/HDR testing/CI
  • VKMS status update;
  • Chamelium boards, video capture.
• Wayland protocols
  • color-management protocol status update;
  • color-representation and video playback.

Display control

• HDR signalling status update;
• backlight status update;
• EDID and DDC/CI.

Strategy for video and gaming use-cases

• Multi-plane support in compositors
  • Underlay, overlay, or mixed strategy for video and gaming use-cases;
  • KMS Plane UAPI to simplify the plane arrangement problem;
  • Shared plane arrangement algorithm desired.
• HDR video and hardware overlay

Frame timing and VRR

• Frame timing:
  • Limitations of uAPI;
  • Current user space solutions;
  • Brainstorm better uAPI;
• Cursor/overlay plane updates with VRR;
• KMS commit and buffer-readiness deadlines;

Power Saving vs Color/Latency

• ABM (adaptive backlight management);
• PSR1 latencies;
• Power optimization vs color accuracy/latency requirements.

Content-Adaptive Scaling & Sharpening

• Content-Adaptive Scalers on display hardware;
• New drm_colorop for content adaptive scaling;
• Proprietary algorithms.

Display Mux

• Laptop muxes for switching of the embedded panel between the integrated GPU and the discrete GPU;
• Seamless/atomic hand-off between drivers on Linux desktops.

Real time scheduling & async KMS API

• Potential benefits: lower latency input feedback, better VRR handling, buffer synchronization, etc.
• Issues around async uAPI usage and async-call handling.

In-person, but also geographically-distributed event This year Linux Display Next hackfest is a hybrid event, hosted onsite at the Igalia offices and available for remote attendance. In-person participants will find an environment for networking and brainstorming in our inspiring and collaborative office space. Additionally, A Coru a itself is a gem waiting to be explored, with stunning beaches, good food, and historical sites.

Semi-structured structure: how the 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest will work

• Agenda: Participants proposed the topics and talks for discussing in sessions.
• Interactive Sessions: Discussions, workshops, introductory talks and brainstorming sessions lasting around 1h30. There is always a starting point for discussions and new ideas will emerge in real time.
• Immersive experience: We will have coffee-breaks between sessions and lunch time at the office for all in-person participants. Lunches and coffee-breaks are sponsored by Igalia. This will keep us sharing knowledge and in continuous interaction.
• Spaces for all group sizes: In-person participants will find different room sizes that match various group sizes at Igalia HQ. Besides that, there will be some devices for showcasing and real-time demonstrations.

Social Activities: building connections beyond the sessions To make the most of your time in A Coru a, we ll be organizing some social activities:

• First-day Dinner: In-person participants will enjoy a Galician dinner on Tuesday, after a first day of intensive discussions in the hackfest.
• Getting to know a little of A Coru a: Finding out a little about A Coru a and current local habits.

• On Thursday afternoon, we will close the 2024 Linux Display Next hackfest with a guided tour of the Museum of Galicia s favorite beer brand, Estrella Galicia. The guided tour covers the eight sectors of the museum and ends with beer pouring and tasting. After this experience, a transfer bus will take us to the Maria Pita square.
• At Maria Pita square we will see the charm of some historical landmarks of A Coru a, explore the casual and vibrant style of the city center and taste local foods while chatting with friends.

Sponsorship Igalia sponsors lunches and coffee-breaks on hackfest days, Tuesday s dinner, and the social event on Thursday afternoon for in-person participants. We can t wait to welcome hackfest attendees to A Coru a! Stay tuned for further details and outcomes of this unconventional and unique experience.

• Andreas Tille [this document]
• Sruthi Chandran [Interview]

How am I? Well, I'm, as I wrote in my platform, I'm a proud grandfather doing a lot of free software stuff, doing a lot of sports, have some goals in mind which I like to do and hopefully for the best of Debian.

How I'm doing today? Well, actually I have some headaches but it's fine for the interview. So, usually I feel very good. Spring was coming here and today it's raining and I plan to do a bicycle tour tomorrow and hope that I do not get really sick but yeah, for the interview it's fine.

Yeah, well, I started with Debian kind of an accident because I wanted to have some package salvaged which is called WordNet. It's a monolingual dictionary and I did not really plan to do more than maybe 10 packages or so. I had some kind of training with xTeddy which is totally unimportant, a cute teddy you can put on your desktop. So, and then well, more or less I thought how can I make Debian attractive for my employer which is a medical institute and so on. It could make sense to package bioinformatics and medicine software and it somehow evolved in a direction I did neither expect it nor wanted to do, that I'm currently the most busy uploader in Debian, created several teams around it. DebianMate is very well known from me. I created the Blends team to create teams and techniques around what we are doing which was Debian TIS, Debian Edu, Debian Science and so on and I also created the packaging team for R, for the statistics package R which is technically based and not topic based. All these blends are covering a certain topic and R is just needed by lots of these blends. So, yeah, and to cope with all this I have written a script which is routing an update to manage all these uploads more or less automatically. So, I think I had one day where I uploaded 21 new packages but it's just automatically generated, right? So, it's on one day more than I ever planned to do.

The worst thing I think about Debian, it's complicated. I think today on Debian board I was asked about the technical progress I want to make and in my opinion we need to standardize things inside Debian. For instance, bringing all the packages to salsa, follow some common standards, some common workflow which is extremely helpful. As I said, if I'm that productive with my own packages we can adopt this in general, at least in most cases I think. I made a lot of good experience by the support of well-formed teams. Well-formed teams are those teams where people support each other, help each other. For instance, how to say, I'm a physicist by profession so I'm not an IT expert. I can tell apart what works and what not but I'm not an expert in those packages. I do and the amount of packages is so high that I do not even understand all the techniques they are covering like Go, Rust and something like this. And I also don't speak Java and I had a problem once in the middle of the night and I've sent the email to the list and was a Java problem and I woke up in the morning and it was solved. This is what I call a team. I don't call a team some common repository that is used by random people for different packages also but it's working together, don't hesitate to solve other people's problems and permit people to get active. This is what I call a team and this is also something I observed in, it's hard to give a percentage, in a lot of other teams but we have other people who do not even understand the concept of the team. Why is working together make some advantage and this is also a tough thing. I [would] like to tackle in my term if I get elected to form solid teams using the common workflow. This is one thing. The other thing is that we have a lot of good people in our infrastructure like FTP masters, DSA and so on. I have the feeling they have a lot of work and are working more or less on their limits, and I like to talk to them [to ask] what kind of change we could do to move that limits or move their personal health to the better side.

Yeah, well this is basically what I said are my main issues. I need to admit I have no really clear imagination what kind of tasks will come to me as a DPL because all these financial issues and law issues possible and issues [that] people who are not really friendly to Debian might create. I'm afraid these things might occupy a lot of time and I can't say much about this because I simply don't know.

As I said, I like to work on standards, I d like to make Debian try [to get it right so] that people don't get overworked, this third key point is be inviting to newcomers, to everybody who wants to come. Yeah, I also mentioned in my term this diversity issue, geographical and from gender point of view. This may be the three points I consider most important.

Yeah, my preferred one? Ah, well, I have no preferred text editor. I'm using the Midnight Commander very frequently which has an internal editor which is convenient for small text. For other things, I usually use VI but I also use Emacs from time to time. So, no, I have not preferred text editor. Whatever works nicely for me.

Yeah, I think the community is extremely important. So, I was on a lot of DebConfs. I think it's not really 20 but 17 or 18 DebCons and I really enjoyed these events every year because I met so many friends and met so many interesting people that it's really enriching my life and those who I never met in person but have read interesting things and yeah, Debian community makes really a part of my life.

Yeah, for instance, last year in Kochi, it became even clearer to me that the geographical diversity is a really strong point. Just discussing with some women from India who is afraid about not coming next year to Busan because there's a problem with Shanghai and so on. I'm not really sure how we can solve this but I think this is a problem at least I wish to tackle and yeah, this is an interesting point, the geographical diversity and I'm running the so-called mentoring of the month. This is a small project to attract newcomers for the Debian Med team which has the focus on medical packages and I learned that we had always men applying for this and so I said, okay, I dropped the constraint of medical packages. Any topic is fine, I teach you packaging but it must be someone who does not consider himself a man. I got only two applicants, no, actually, I got one applicant and one response which was kind of strange if I'm hunting for women or so. I did not understand but I got one response and interestingly, it was for me one of the least expected counters. It was from Iran and I met a very nice woman, very open, very skilled and gifted and did a good job or have even lose contact today and maybe we need more actively approach groups that are underrepresented. I don't know if what's a good means which I did but at least I tried and so I try to think about these kind of things.

Well, the card game which is called Mao on the DebConf made me smile all the time. I admit I joined only two or three times even if I really love this kind of games but I was occupied by other stuff so this made me really smile. I also think the first online DebConf in 2020 made me smile because we had this kind of short video sequences and I tried to make a funny video sequence about every DebConf I attended before. This is really funny moments but yeah, it's not only smile but yeah. One thing maybe it's totally unconnected to Debian but I learned personally something in Debian that we have a do-ocracy and you can do things which you think that are right if not going in between someone else, right? So respect everybody else but otherwise you can do so. And in 2020 I also started to take trees which are growing widely in my garden and plant them into the woods because in our woods a lot of trees are dying and so I just do something because I can. I have the resource to do something, take the small tree and bring it into the woods because it does not harm anybody. I asked the forester if it is okay, yes, yes, okay. So everybody can do so but I think the idea to do something like this came also because of the free software idea. You have the resources, you have the computer, you can do something and you do something productive, right? And when thinking about this I think it was also my Debian work. Meanwhile I have planted more than 3,000 trees so it's not a small number but yeah, I enjoy this.

Yeah, it's basically the same as I said before. We need more standards to work together. I do not want to repeat this but this is what I think, yeah.

It's also in general, the thing is the fact that I'm maintaining packages which are usually as modern software is maintained in Git, which is fine but we have some software which is at Sourceport, we have software laying around somewhere, we have software where Debian somehow became Upstream because nobody is caring anymore and free software is very different in several things, ways and well, I in principle like freedom of choice which is the basic of all our work. Sometimes this freedom goes in the way of productivity because everybody is free to re-implement. You asked me for the most favorite editor. In principle one really good working editor would be great to have and would work and we have maybe 500 in Debian or so, I don't know. I could imagine if people would concentrate and say five instead of 500 editors, we could get more productive, right? But I know this will not happen, right? But I think this is one thing which goes in the way of making things smooth and productive and we could have more manpower to replace one person who's [having] children, doing some other stuff and can't continue working on something and maybe this is a problem I will not solve, definitely not, but which I see.

Yeah, well, okay, we can bring together different Upstreams, so we are building some packages and have some general overview about similar things and can say, oh, you are doing this and some other person is doing more or less the same, do you want to join each other or so, but this is kind of a channel we have to our Upstreams which is probably not very successful. It starts with code copies of some libraries which are changed a little bit, which is fine license-wise, but not so helpful for different things and so I've tried to convince those Upstreams to forward their patches to the original one, but for this and I think we could do some kind of, yeah, [find] someone who brings Upstream together or to make them stop their forking stuff, but it costs a lot of energy and we probably don't have this and it's also not realistic that we can really help with this problem.

I enjoyed the interview, I enjoyed seeing you again after half a year or so. Yeah, actually I've seen you in the eating room or cheese and wine party or so, I do not remember we had to really talk together, but yeah, people around, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

A welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.

Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.

Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya

Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. There are shared songthaews which run along Jomtien Second road and takes 10 bath to anywhere on the route.

Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.

A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.

This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.

Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry

Wat Arun temple

Khao San Road

A food stall at Khao San Road

Chao Phraya Express Boat

Banana with yellow flesh

Fruits at a stall in Bangkok

Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.

Corn in Bangkok.

A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.

In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.

Red wine being served in Air India

Notes

• In this whole trip spanning two weeks, I did not pay for drinking water (except for once in Pattaya which was 9 baht) and toilets. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur have plenty of malls where you should find a free-of-cost toilet nearby. For drinking water, I relied mainly on my accommodation providing refillable water for my bottle.
• Thailand seemed more expensive than Malaysia on average. Malaysia had discounted price due to the Chinese New year.
• I liked Pattaya more than Bangkok. Maybe because Pattaya has beach and Bangkok doesn t. Pattaya seemed more lively, and I could meet and talk to a few people as opposed to Bangkok.
• Chao Phraya River express boat costs 150 baht for one day where you can hop on and off to any boat.

Assignment FooBar/
  Student A_21100_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student A's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student A's perfectly named assignment.xopp
  Student B_21094_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student B's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student B's perfectly named assignment.xopp
  Student C_21093_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student C's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student C's perfectly named assignment.xopp
 

#!/usr/bin/python3
# Copyright (C) 2023, Louis-Philippe V ronneau <pollo@debian.org>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
"""
This script aims to take a directory containing PDF files exported via the
Moodle mass download function, remove everything but the final files to submit
back to the students and zip it back.
usage: ./moodle-zip.py <target_dir>
"""
import os
import shutil
import sys
import tempfile
from fnmatch import fnmatch
def sanity(directory):
    """Run sanity checks before doing anything else"""
    base_directory = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(directory))
    if not os.path.isdir(directory):
        sys.exit(f"Target directory  directory  is not a valid directory")
    if os.path.exists(f"/tmp/ base_directory .zip"):
        sys.exit(f"Final ZIP file path '/tmp/ base_directory .zip' already exists")
    for root, dirnames, _ in os.walk(directory):
        for dirname in dirnames:
            corrige_present = False
            for file in os.listdir(os.path.join(root, dirname)):
                if fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    corrige_present = True
            if corrige_present is False:
                sys.exit(f"Directory  dirname  does not contain a 'graded paper.pdf' file")
def clean(directory):
    """Remove superfluous files, to keep only the graded PDF"""
    with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmp_dir:
        shutil.copytree(directory, tmp_dir, dirs_exist_ok=True)
        for root, _, filenames in os.walk(tmp_dir):
            for file in filenames:
                if not fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    os.remove(os.path.join(root, file))
        compress(tmp_dir, directory)
def compress(directory, target_dir):
    """Compress directory into a ZIP file and save it to the target dir"""
    target_dir = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(target_dir))
    shutil.make_archive(f"/tmp/ target_dir ", 'zip', directory)
    print(f"Final ZIP file has been saved to '/tmp/ target_dir .zip'")
def main():
    """Main function"""
    target_dir = sys.argv[1]
    sanity(target_dir)
    clean(target_dir)
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The clearance was entered initially with estimated import charges of 400.03, consisting of 387.83 VAT, and 12.20 disbursement fee. This original entry regrettably did not include the freight cost for calculating the VAT, and as such when submitted for final entry the VAT value was adjusted to include this and an amended invoice was issued for an additional 39.84. HMRC calculate the amount against which VAT is raised using the value of goods, insurance and freight, however they also may apply a VAT adjustment figure. The VAT Adjustment is based on many factors (Incidental costs in regards to a shipment), which includes charge for currency conversion if the invoice does not list values in Sterling, but the main is due to the inland freight from airport of destination to the final delivery point, as this charge varies, for example, from EMA to Edinburgh would be 150, from EMA to Derby would be 1, so each year UPS must supply HMRC with all values incurred for entry build up and they give an average which UPS have to use on the entry build up as the VAT Adjustment. The correct calculation for the import charges is therefore as follows: Goods value divided by exchange rate 2,489.53 EUR / 1.1683 = 2,130.89 GBP Duty: Goods value plus freight (%) 2,130.89 GBP + 5% = 2,237.43 GBP. That total times the duty rate. X 0 % = 0 GBP VAT: Goods value plus freight (100%) 2,130.89 GBP + 0 = 2,130.89 GBP That total plus duty and VAT adjustment 2,130.89 GBP + 0 GBP + 7.49 GBP = 2,348.08 GBP. That total times 20% VAT = 427.67 GBP As detailed above we must confirm that the final VAT charges applied to the shipment were correct, and that no refund of this is therefore due.

State under what principle of English law (such as, what enactment or principle of Common Law), you levy the disbursement fee (or refund it).

A disbursement fee is a fee for amounts paid or processed on behalf of a client. It is an established category of charge used by legal firms, amongst other companies, for billing of various ancillary costs which may be incurred in completion of service. Disbursement fees are not covered by a specific law, nor are they legally prohibited. Regarding UPS disbursement fee this is an administrative charge levied for the use of UPS deferment account to prepay import charges for clearance through CDS. This charge would therefore be billed to the party that is responsible for the import charges, normally the consignee or receiver of the shipment in question. The disbursement fee as applied is legitimate, and as you have stated is a commonly used and recognised charge throughout the courier industry, and I can confirm that this was charged correctly in this instance.

Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software Best Paper award In February 2022, we announced in these reports that a paper written by Chris Lamb and Stefano Zacchiroli was now available in the March/April 2022 issue of IEEE Software. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (PDF). This month, however, IEEE Software announced that this paper has won their Best Paper award for 2022.

Reproducibility to affect package migration policy in Debian In a post summarising the activities of the Debian Release Team at a recent in-person Debian event in Cambridge, UK, Paul Gevers announced a change to the way packages are migrated into the staging area for the next stable Debian release based on its reproducibility status:

The folks from the Reproducibility Project have come a long way since they started working on it 10 years ago, and we believe it s time for the next step in Debian. Several weeks ago, we enabled a migration policy in our migration software that checks for regression in reproducibility. At this moment, that is presented as just for info, but we intend to change that to delays in the not so distant future. We eventually want all packages to be reproducible. To stimulate maintainers to make their packages reproducible now, we ll soon start to apply a bounty [speedup] for reproducible builds, like we ve done with passing autopkgtests for years. We ll reduce the bounty for successful autopkgtests at that moment in time.

Speranza: Usable, privacy-friendly software signing Kelsey Merrill, Karen Sollins, Santiago Torres-Arias and Zachary Newman have developed a new system called Speranza, which is aimed at reassuring software consumers that the product they are getting has not been tampered with and is coming directly from a source they trust. A write-up on TechXplore.com goes into some more details:

What we have done, explains Sollins, is to develop, prove correct, and demonstrate the viability of an approach that allows the [software] maintainers to remain anonymous. Preserving anonymity is obviously important, given that almost everyone software developers included value their confidentiality. This new approach, Sollins adds, simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer. [ ]

The corresponding paper is published on the arXiv preprint server in various formats, and the announcement has also been covered in MIT News.

Nondeterministic Git bundles Paul Baecher published an interesting blog post on Reproducible git bundles. For those who are not familiar with them, Git bundles are used for the offline transfer of Git objects without an active server sitting on the other side of a network connection. Anyway, Paul wrote about writing a backup system for his entire system, but:

I noticed that a small but fixed subset of [Git] repositories are getting backed up despite having no changes made. That is odd because I would think that repeated bundling of the same repository state should create the exact same bundle. However [it] turns out that for some, repositories bundling is nondeterministic.

Paul goes on to to describe his solution, which involves forcing git to be single threaded makes the output deterministic . The article was also discussed on Hacker News.

Output from libxlst now deterministic libxslt is the XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project, where XSLT itself is an XML language to define transformations for XML files. This month, it was revealed that the result of the generate-id() XSLT function is now deterministic across multiple transformations, fixing many issues with reproducible builds. As the Git commit by Nick Wellnhofer describes:

Rework the generate-id() function to return deterministic values. We use
a simple incrementing counter and store ids in the 'psvi' member of
nodes which was freed up by previous commits. The presence of an id is
indicated by a new "source node" flag.
This fixes long-standing problems with reproducible builds, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751621
This also hardens security, as the old implementation leaked the
difference between a heap and a global pointer, see
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1356211
The old implementation could also generate the same id for dynamically
created nodes which happened to reuse the same memory. Ids for namespace
nodes were completely broken. They now use the id of the parent element
together with the hex-encoded namespace prefix.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Chris Lamb fixing the generate-draft script to not blow up if the input files have been corrupted today or even in the past [ ], Holger Levsen updated the Hamburg 2023 summit to add a link to farewell post [ ] & to add a picture of a Post-It note. [ ], and Pol Dellaiera updated the paragraph about tar and the --clamp-mtime flag [ ]. On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted an interesting summary on some of the reasons why packages are still not reproducible in 2023. diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including processing objdump symbol comment filter inputs as Python byte (and not str) instances [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian extended diffoscope support for GNU Guix [ ] and updated the version in that distribution to version 253 [ ].

Challenges of Producing Software Bill Of Materials for Java Musard Balliu, Benoit Baudry, Sofia Bobadilla, Mathias Ekstedt, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Aman Sharma, Gabriel Skoglund, C sar Soto-Valero and Martin Wittlinger (!) of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have published an article in which they:

deep-dive into 6 tools and the accuracy of the SBOMs they produce for complex open-source Java projects. Our novel insights reveal some hard challenges regarding the accurate production and usage of software bills of materials.

The paper is available on arXiv.

Debian Non-Maintainer campaign As mentioned in previous reports, the Reproducible Builds team within Debian has been organising a series of online and offline sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing so-called NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, Vagrant Cascadian performed a number of such uploads, including:

• crack [ ] (#1021521 & #1021522)
• dustmite [ ] (#1020878 & #1020879)
• edid-decode [ ] (#1020877)
• gentoo [ ] (#1024284)
• haskell98-report [ ] (#1024007)
• infinipath-psm [ ] (#990862)
• lcm [ ] (#1024286)
• libapache-mod-evasive [ ] (#1020800)
• libccrtp [ ] (#860470)
• libinput [ ] (#995809)
• lirc [ ] (#979019, #979023 & #979024)
• mm-common [ ] (#977177)
• mpl-sphinx-theme [ ] (#1005826)
• psi [ ] (#1017473)
• python-parse-type [ ] (#1002671)
• ruby-tioga [ ] (#1005727)
• ucspi-proxy [ ] (#1024125)
• ypserv [ ] (#983138)

In addition, Holger Levsen performed three no-source-change NMUs in order to address the last packages without .buildinfo files in Debian trixie, specifically lorene (0.0.0~cvs20161116+dfsg-1.1), maria (1.3.5-4.2) and ruby-rinku (1.7.3-2.1).

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In December, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Fix matching packages for the [R programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language). [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add a Certbot configuration for the Nginx web server. [ ]
  • Enable debugging for the create-meta-pkgs tool. [ ][ ]
• Arch Linux-related changes
  • The asp has been deprecated by pkgctl; thanks to dvzrv for the pointer. [ ]
  • Disable the Arch Linux builders for now. [ ]
  • Stop referring to the /trunk branch / subdirectory. [ ]
  • Use --protocol https when cloning repositories using the pkgctl tool. [ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Install the python3-setuptools and swig packages, which are now needed to build OpenWrt. [ ]
  • Install pkg-config needed to build Coreboot artifacts. [ ]
  • Detect failures due to an issue where the fakeroot tool is implicitly required but not automatically installed. [ ]
  • Detect failures due to rename of the vmlinuz file. [ ]
  • Improve the grammar of an error message. [ ]
  • Document that freebsd-jenkins.debian.net has been updated to FreeBSD 14.0. [ ]

In addition, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • apr (hostname issue)
  • dune (parallelism)
  • epy (time-based .pyc issue)
  • fpc (Year 2038)
  • gap (date)
  • gh (FTBFS in 2024)
  • kubernetes (fixed random build path)
  • libgda (date)
  • libguestfs (tar)
  • metamail (date)
  • mpi-selector (date)
  • neovim (randomness in Lua)
  • nml (time-based .pyc)
  • pommed (parallelism)
  • procmail (benchmarking)
  • pysnmp (FTBFS in 2038)
  • python-efl (drop Sphinx doctrees)
  • python-pyface (time)
  • python-pytest-salt-factories (time-based .pyc issue)
  • python-quimb (fails to build on single-CPU systems)
  • python-rdflib (random)
  • python-yarl (random path)
  • qt6-webengine (parallelism issue in documentation)
  • texlive (Gzip modification time issue)
  • waf (time-based .pyc)
  • warewulf (CPIO modification time and inode issue)
  • xemacs (toolchain hostname)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1057710 filed against python-aiostream.
  • #1057721 filed against openpyxl.
  • #1058681 filed against python-multipletau.
  • #1059013 filed against wxmplot.
  • #1059014 filed against stunnel4.
• James Addison:
  • #1059592 & #1059631 filed against qttools-opensource-src.

---

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.
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

> db <- tools::CRAN_package_db()
> deps <- tools::package_dependencies(c("ggplot2", "hrbrthemes"), recursive=TRUE, db=db
> Filter(\(x) x != "ggplot2", setdiff(deps[[2]], deps[[1]]))
 [1] "extrafont"         "knitr"             "rmarkdown"         "htmltools"        
 [5] "tools"             "gdtools"           "extrafontdb"       "Rttf2pt1"         
 [9] "Rcpp"              "systemfonts"       "gfonts"            "curl"             
[13] "fontquiver"        "base64enc"         "digest"            "ellipsis"         
[17] "fastmap"           "evaluate"          "highr"             "xfun"             
[21] "yaml"              "bslib"             "fontawesome"       "jquerylib"        
[25] "jsonlite"          "stringr"           "tinytex"           "cachem"           
[29] "memoise"           "mime"              "sass"              "fontBitstreamVera"
[33] "fontLiberation"    "shiny"             "crul"              "crayon"           
[37] "stringi"           "cpp11"             "urltools"          "httpcode"         
[41] "fs"                "rappdirs"          "httpuv"            "xtable"           
[45] "sourcetools"       "later"             "promises"          "commonmark"       
[49] "triebeard"        
>

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

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• tracer: mention needrestart
• duck: add inactive project indicator
• Debian wiki pages: AutoGeneratedFiles, CopyrightReviewTools, CornerCase, CrossGrading, DeveloperNews, Hardware/Wanted, InstallingDebianOn/SiFive/HiFiveUnmatched
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources
• vcs-home wiki: add more dotfile repos/tools

Issues

• Files in wrong dir in git-cola
• Conffile removal needed in dkms
• New SWH listers needed for HGKeeper, Smithy, humungus, git-arr, gitile, gotweb, ABF, Bonobo Git Server, darcsden

Review

• Debian packages: sponsored purple-discord x2
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved c-evo-dh-gtk2 fim fish foliate mpc123 nfoview qpwgraph scite viewnior
  • rejected hw-probe (photos), wine64 (desktop logo), phasex (artwork), qpwgraph (about dialog), fim/fish (help output), python-lunch (full desktop), ruby-full (website), ausweisapp2 (PII), pngtools (movie poster), x11vnc (web page,) mount (systemd), blastem (photo), ca-certificates (tiny, Windows)

Administration

• Debian servers: extract user data from recent wiki backups
• Debian wiki: fix broken user account, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC.

Sponsors The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.