What happened in the
reproducible
builds effort this week:
Toolchain fixes
Emmanuel Bourg uploaded
eigenbase-resgen/1.3.0.13768-2 which uses of the
scm-safe comment style by default to make them deterministic.
Mattia Rizzolo started a
new thread on debian-devel to ask a wider audience for issues about the
-Wdate-time compile time flag. When enabled, GCC and clang print warnings when
__DATE__,
__TIME__, or
__TIMESTAMP__ are used. Having the
flag set by default would prompt maintainers to remove these source of unreproducibility from the sources.
Packages fixed
The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
bmake,
cyrus-imapd-2.4,
drobo-utils,
eigenbase-farrago,
fhist,
fstrcmp,
git-dpm,
intercal,
libexplain,
libtemplates-parser,
mcl,
openimageio,
pcal,
powstatd,
ruby-aggregate,
ruby-archive-tar-minitar,
ruby-bert,
ruby-dbd-odbc,
ruby-dbd-pg,
ruby-extendmatrix,
ruby-rack-mobile-detect,
ruby-remcached,
ruby-stomp,
ruby-test-declarative,
ruby-wirble,
vtprint.
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:
- #804729 on pbuilder by Reiner Herrmann: tell
dblatex to build in a deterministic path.
reproducible.debian.net
The fifth and sixth
armhf build nodes have been set up, resulting in five more builder jobs for
armhf. More than 10,000 packages have now been identified as reproducible with the
reproducible toolchain on
armhf. (Vagrant Cascadian, h01ger)
Helmut Grohne and Mattia Rizzolo now have
root access on all 12 build nodes used by
reproducible.debian.net and
jenkins.debian.net. (h01ger)
reproducible-builds.org is now linked from all package pages and the reproducible.debian.net dashboard. (h01ger)
profitbricks-build5-amd64 and
profitbricks-build6-amd64, responsible for running
amd64 tests now run 398.26 days in the future. This means that one of the two builds that are being compared will be run on a different minute, hour, day, month, and year. This is not yet the case for
armhf. FreeBSD tests are also done with 398.26 days difference. (h01ger)
The design of the
Arch Linux test page has been greatly improved. (Levente Polyak)
diffoscope development
Three releases of diffoscope happened this week numbered 39 to 41. It includes support for EPUB files (Reiner Herrmann) and Free Pascal unit files, usually having
.ppu as extension (Paul Gevers).
The rest of the changes were mostly targetting at making it easier to run diffoscope on other systems. The
tlsh,
rpm, and
debian modules are now all optional. The test suite will properly skip tests that need optional tools or modules when they are not available. As a result, diffosope is
now available on PyPI and thanks to the work of Levente Polyak
in Arch Linux.
Getting these versions in Debian was a bit cumbersome. Version 39 was uploaded with an expired key (according to the keyring on
ftp.debian.org which will hopefully be updated soon) which is currently handled by keeping the files in the queue
without REJECTing them. This prevented any other Debian Developpers to upload the same version. Version 40 was uploaded as a source-only upload but failed to build from source which had the
undesirable side effect of removing the previous version from unstable. The package faild to build from source because it was built passing
-I to
debbuild. This excluded the ELF object files and static archives used by the test suite from the archive, preventing the test suite to work correctly. Hopefully, in
a nearby future it will be possible to implement a sanity check to prevent such mistakes in the future.
It has also been identified that
ppudump outputs time in the system timezone without considering the
TZ environment variable. Zachary Vance and Paul Gevers raised the issue on the
appropriate channels.
strip-nondeterminism development
Chris Lamb released strip-nondeterminism version 0.014-1 which disables stripping Mono binaries as it is
too aggressive and the source of the problem is being worked on by Mono upstream.
Package reviews
133
reviews have been removed, 115 added and 103 updated this week.
Chris West and Chris Lamb reported 57 new FTBFS bugs.
Misc.
The video of h01ger and Chris Lamb's talk at MiniDebConf Cambridge is
now available.
h01ger gave a talk at CCC Hamburg on November 13th, which was well received and sparked some interest among Gentoo folks. Slides and video should be available shortly.
Frederick Kautz has started to revive Dhiru Kholia's work on
testing Fedora packages.
Your editor wish to once again thank #debian-reproducible regulars for reviewing these reports weeks after weeks.
Improvements are 
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 
Nearly 40 participants from 14 different free software project had very busy
days sharing knowledge, building understanding, and producing actual patches.
Anyone interested in cross project discussions should join the 
Infrastructure
Several discussions at the meeting helped refine a shared understanding of what
kind of information should be recorded on a build, and how they could be used.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor sent a 
Package reviews
103 
