Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday June 11 and Saturday June 17 2017: Upcoming events

• On June 19th, Chris Lamb presented at LinuxCon China 2017 on Reproducible Builds.
• h01ger created a poll for a date for the next Reproducible Builds summit, please vote if you are interested in attending.
• Our next IRC meeting will be on the 6th of July at 17:00 UTC with the following agenda.

Upstream patches and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • gnuradio + volk
  • pymol
  • distorm
  • qtscriptgenerator
  • cpython
  • x3270 x3270
  • sphinx
  • obs-service-tar_scm
  • osc
  • matplotlib merged
  • pyparted merged
  • bjoern merged

Reviews of unreproducible packages 1 package review has been added, 19 have been updated and 2 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Edmund Grimley Evans (1)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Document the 'h' variable in our raw_feeder
  • Split diffoscope.difference into feeders
  • Tidy diffoscope/difference.py
• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a PartialString class
  • More ydiff/linediff from diffoscope. difference => diff to group unified_diff related things together
  • difference: has_children -> has_visible_children, and take into account comments
  • Add various traverse_ methods to Difference
  • Move side-by-side and linediff algorithms to difference.py
  • Refactor html-dir presenter to be a class instance, avoiding global state
  • html-dir: show/hide diff comments, which can be very large

tests.reproducible-builds.org As you might have noticed, Debian stretch was released last week. Since then, Mattia and Holger renamed our testing suite to stretch and added a buster suite so that we keep our historic results for stretch visible and can continue our development work as usual. In this sense, happy hacking on buster; may it become the best Debian release ever and hopefully the first reproducible one!

• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Proposed reducing the number of concurrent builds each armhf machine runs, to reduce out-of-memory errors, crashes and false positives with FTBFS on armhf, reducing the number of armhf build workers from 70 to 51.
• Valerie Young: Add highlighting in navigation for the new nodes health pages.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Do not dump database ACL in the backups.
  • Deduplicate SSLCertificateFile directive into the common-directives-ssl macro
  • Apache: t.r-b.o: redirect /testing/ to /stretch/
  • db: s/testing/stretch/g
  • Start adding code to test buster...
• Holger Levsen:
  • Update README.infrastructure to explain who has root access where.
  • reproducible_nodes_info.sh: correctly recognize zero builds per day.
  • Add build nodes health overview page, then split it in three: health overview, daily munin graphs and weekly munin graphs.
  • reproducible_worker.sh: improve handling of systemctl timeouts.
  • reproducible_build_service: sleep less and thus restart failed workers sooner.
  • Replace ftp.(de uk us).debian.org with deb.debian.org everywhere.
  • Performance page: also show local problems with _build_service.sh (which are autofixed after a maximum of 133.7 minutes).
  • Rename nodes_info job to html_nodes_info.
  • Add new node health check jobs, split off from maintenance jobs, run every 15 minutes.
    • Add two new checks: 1. for correct future (2019 is incorrect atm, and we sometimes got that). 2.) for writeable /tmp (sometimes happens on borked armhf nodes).
  • Add jobs for testing buster.
  • s/testing/stretch/g in all the code.
  • Finish the code to deal with buster.
  • Teach jessie and Ubuntu 16.04 how to debootstrap buster.

Axel Beckert is currently in the process of setting up eight LeMaker HiKey960 boards. These boards were sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and will be hosted by the SOSETH students association at ETH Zurich. Thanks to everyone involved here and also thanks to Martin Michlmayr and Steve Geary who initiated getting these boards to us. Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday June 4 and Saturday June 10 2017: Past and upcoming events On June 10th, Chris Lamb presented at the Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2017 on reproducible builds. Patches and bugs filed

• Chris Lamb: #864082 filed against fontconfig, forwarded upstream

Reviews of unreproducible packages 7 package reviews have been added, 10 have been updated and 14 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (4)
• Chris Lamb (1)
• Christoph Biedl (1)
• Niko Tyni (1)

Two FTBFS issues of LEDE (exposed in our setup) were found and were fixed:

• build: ensure that flock is available for make download (Felix Fietkau)
• include/toplevel: set env GIT_ASKPASS=/bin/true (Alexander 'lynxis' Couzens)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb: Some code style improvements

tests.reproducible-builds.org: Alexander 'lynxis' Couzens made some changes for testing LEDE and OpenWrt:

• Build tar before downloading everything: On system without tar --sort=name we need to compile tar before downloading everything
• Set CONFIG_AUTOREMOVE to reduce required space
• Create a workaround for signing keys: LEDE signs the release with a signing key, but generates the signing key if it's not present. To have a reproducible release we need to take care of signing keys.
• openwrt_get_banner(): use staging_dir instead of build_dir because the former is persistent among the two builds.
• Don't build all packages to improve development speed for now.
• Only build one board instead of all boards. Reducing the build time improves developing speed. Once the image is reproducible we will enable more boards.
• Disable node_cleanup_tmpdirs

Hans-Christoph Steiner, for testing F-Droid:

• Do full git reset/clean like Jenkins does
• hard code WORKSPACE dir names, as WORKSPACE cannot be generated from $0 as it's a temporary name.

Daniel Shahaf, for testing Debian:

• Remote scheduler:
  • English fix to error message.
  • Allow multiple architectures in one invocation.
  • Refactor: Break out a helper function. Rename variable to disambiguate with scheduling_args.message.
• Include timestamps in logs
• Set timestamps to second resolution (was millisecond by default).

Holger 'h01ger' Levsen, for testing Debian:

• Improvements to the breakages page:
  • List broken packages and diffoscope problems first, and t.r-b.o problems last.
  • Reword, drop 'caused by'.
• Add niceness to our list of variations, running with niceness of 11 for the first build and niceness of 10 for the second one. Thanks to Vagrant for the idea.
• Automatic scheduler:
  • Reschedule after 12h packages that failed with error 404
  • Run scheduler every 3h instead of every 6h
• Add basic README about the infrastructure and merge Vagrants notes about his console host.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 28 and Saturday June 3 2017: Past an upcoming events

• On June 9th, Chris Lamb will present at the Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2017 on reproducible builds.
• We restarted our IRC meetings, now with a monthly schedule where we meet on the first Thursday of the month at a varying time. Our next meeting will be on the first 6th of July at 17:00 UTC. At the June meeting we had the following agenda, and if you are interested there is an automated summary and full logs too.
  1. Introductions
  2. Feedback for the reproducible.json spec format - is that suitable for Guix and F-Droid as well? LEDE/OpenWrt? Coreboot?
  3. writing parser + user interface for reproducible.json
  4. tests.r-b.o/Debian once Stretch has been released
  5. Reproducible Builds Summit 2017
  6. Next meeting
  7. Any other business

Documentation updates

• Holger added a link to the blog post with a report about the recent hackathon to our website.

Toolchain development and fixes

• Chris Lamb wrote a proof-of-concept implementation for #863622 ("apt: warn when installing packages that are not reproducible"). Try it, it's fun!
• Russ worked on making the debian-policy package build reproducibly which is a good opportunity to shamelessly plug that #844431 ("debian-policy: Packages should be reproducible") is still a work in progress.

Patches and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • pycryptopp
  • rpm
  • rpm
  • bam
  • boost/jam
  • premake
  • ruby/rdoc
  • ruby/rdoc
  • sdcc (merged)

4 package reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (2)
• Chris Lamb (1)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add comparator for Fontconfig cache files.
• anthraxx:
  • tools: extend external Arch Linux tools
• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a --exclude-command CLI for filtering out long-running commands like "readelf --debug-dump=info"
  • Use unicode chars for the +/- controls instead of hacky punctuation
  • Don't show +/- controls for differences with no children
  • Fix create_limited_print_func
  • Add a size() method to Difference and check that self._visuals is empty in get_reverse()
  • Add a reader for the JSON format
  • Allow the "source" param to overridden compare() methods to be given as a positional argument

tests.reproducible-builds.org Mattia Rizzolo:

• packages-tests: go back to the shorter way of specifying JUnit jobs.
• update_jdn: call jenkins-jobs instead of jenkins-job-builder, as that's how it is named in 1.6.1 version.
• Upload jenkins-job-builder 1.6.1-1~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor:

• Contribute a few typo fixes.

Vagrant Cascadian:

• Update README to reflect switch to PostgreSQL (some time ago).
• Add three new boards for armhf tests:
  • ff64a-armhf-rb.debian.net: Firefly-rk3399, Rockchip six-core (Cortex-A72 x2 + Cortex-A53 x4), 2GB RAM, USB-sata (future plans for native sata.)
  • jtx1a-armhf-rb.debian.net: Jetson-tx1, quad-core (big.LITTLE Cortex-A53/A57), ~3.5GB RAM, native SATA ~500GB disk
  • odc2a-armhf-rb.debian.net: Odroic-C2, quad-core (Cortex-A53), ~2GB ram, 128GB eMMC
• Ressurect rpi2c-armhf-rb.debian.net (Raspberry PI 2B, broadcom bcm2836 quad-core (cortex-A7), 1GB RAM) from the dead.

Holger Levsen:

• Configure the rc.local service on all build nodes to only start when the network is actually up, as configuring half of them to run in the future requires networking to determine the real current date. See Running Services After the Network is up if you want to learn more about networking with systemd. Somehow this doesnt work yet on the Ubuntu 16.05 arm64 nodes; help welcome, either on #debian-qa or #debian-reproducible.
• Add rpi2c back to the armhf network.
• Also add ff64a, odc2a & jtx1a to the armhf network.
  • Add pbuilder/schroot-setup jobs for the new nodes.
  • Add 10 new armhf builder jobs.
  • Disable all build jobs on odc2a again as haveged segfaults on 4.12~rc2, which is needed for this board & setup.
• Reproducible_cleanup_nodes.sh: adapt for new build service
• Make performance.html show if build jobs are down due to remote node problems and make code to count enabled jobs more robust.
• reproducible_build_service: Make it cope with disabled workers.
• jenkins-master-wrapper: Fail loudly if remote node is not accessable.
• Increase maximum scheduling queue sizes, to adjust for faster scheduler.
• New script, init_node, to initialize new build nodes (derived from refactored existing script).
• Update INSTALL documentation to reflect that we're testing arm64 now too.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 21 and Saturday May 27 2017: Past and upcoming events Bernhard M. Wiedemann gave a short talk on reproducible builds in openSUSE at the openSUSE Conference 2017. Slides and video recordings are available on that page. Chris Lamb will present at the Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2017 on reproducible builds on June 9th. Our next IRC meeting has been scheduled for Thursday June 1 at 16:00 UTC with this agenda. Academia Justin Cappos continued his work on the reproducible builds paper, with text and suggestions from Ximin Luo integrated. Toolchain developments #863470: "ftp.debian.org: security sync must not exclude .buildinfo" - while this bug isn't fixed, you need to make sure not to build jessie updates with stretch's dpkg, or else the upload will be rejected. Ximin Luo built GCC twice and ran diffoscope on them. Unfortunately the results were 1.7 GB in size and it can't be displayed in a web browser. 99/171 of the .debs are reproducible, though. He's now working on diffoscope (see below) to make it generate output more intelligently for such large size diffs. Here is a summary diff where the recursion depth cut-off was set low, so the size is reasonable and one can still see the outlines of where to look next. debuerreotype was newly added to Debian unstable. It is a reproducible, snapshot-based Debian rootfs builder. Patches and bugs filed

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #863202 filed against adonthell-data.
  • #863208 filed against mash.
  • #863414 filed against coyim.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #863117 filed against scilab.
• James Clarke:
  • #863493 filed against symfony.
• Justin Cappos:
  • Follow up about #822197 against sphinx.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • FBReader
  • hwinfo
  • intel-cmt-cat
  • libtorrent
  • mupdf
  • pesign
  • python-spidermonkey
  • selinux
  • silc
  • TPM2.0-TSS
  • dosemu merged
  • ebiso merged
  • honggfuzz merged
  • john merged
  • libtomcrypt merged
  • opalvoip merged
  • PyQt4/5 merged
  • spacenav merged
  • wavemon merged

Reviews of unreproducible packages 29 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 23 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (10)
• Chris Lamb (2)
• James Clarke (1)

diffoscope development Development continued in git, with commits from:

• Ximin Luo:
  • Refactor container-related logic to make the code clearer.
  • Various improvements to the progress bar, making it behave more accurately and make it compatible with --debug logging output.
  • Fix --exclude control.tar.gz.
  • When enforcing max-container-depth, show which internal files differ, without showing their details.
  • Add --max-container-depth CLI option.

strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.034-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included previous weeks' contributions from:

• Chris Lamb
  • Only print log messages by default if the file was actually modified. (Closes: #863033)
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann
  • zip: make sure we have permissions on extracted file
  • Add function prototypes.

tests.reproducible-builds.org:

• Alexander Couzens
  • Use Alexander's LEDE git repo to test his mksquashfs patches.
• Daniel Shahaf
  • Refactored reproducible_remote_scheduler.py to add support for multiple suites in one invocation.
• Holger Levsen
  • Prevent the two fdroid jobs from running together by using the Build Blocker Plugin.
  • A niceness variation was also added (see #863440) to the Debian tests, but this change was reverted for now, as it was breaking stuff and needs to be readded properly.
  • Some adjustments to the Debian scheduler, still due to the improve performance through the new build services.
• Mattia Rizzolo
  • Update dsa-check-running-kernel from dsa-nagios (to support kernel 4.x as present in stretch) on all jenkins nodes.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 7 and Saturday May 13 2017: Report from Reproducible Builds Hamburg Hackathon We were 16 participants from 12 projects: 7 Debian, 2 repeatr.io, 1 ArchLinux, 1 coreboot + LEDE, 1 F-Droid, 1 ElectroBSD + privoxy, 1 GNU R, 1 in-toto.io, 1 Meson and 1 openSUSE. Three people came from the USA, 3 from the UK, 2 Finland, 1 Austria, 1 Denmark and 6 from Germany, plus we several guests from our gracious hosts at the CCCHH hackerspace as well as a guest from Australia We had four presentations:

• "Reproducible Builds everywhere" by h01ger
• https://in-toto.io by Justin Cappos
• http://repeatr.io by Eric Myhre
• http://mesonbuild.com by Jussi Pakkanen

Some of the things we worked on:

• h01ger did orga stuff for this very hackathon, discussed tests.r-b.o with various non-Debian contributors, filed some bugs and restarted the policy discussion in #844431. He also did some polishing work on tests.r-b.o which shall be covered in next issue of our weekly blog.
• Justin Cappos involved many of us in interesting discussions and started to write an academic paper about Reproducible Builds of which he shared an early beta on our mailinglist.
• Chris Lamb (lamby) filed a number of patches for individual packages, worked on diffoscope, merged many changes to strip-nondeterminism and also filed #862073 against dak to upload buildinfo files to external services.
• Maria Glukhova (siamezzze) fixed a bug with plots on tests.reproducible-builds.org and worked on diffoscope test coverage.
• Lynxis worked on a new squashfs upstream release improving support for reproducible squashfs filesystems and also had some time to hack on coreboot and show others how to install coreboot on real hardware.
• Michael Poehn worked on integrating F-Droid builds into tests.reproducible-builds.org, on the F-Droid verification utility and also ran some app reproducibility tests.
• Bernhard worked on various unreproducible issues upstream and submitted fixes for curl, bzr, ant.
• Erin Myhre worked on bootstrapping cleanroom builds of compiler components in Repeatr sandboxes.
• Calvin Behling merged improvements to reppl for a cleaner storage format and better error handling and did design work for next version of repeatr pipeline execution. Calvin also lead the reproducibility testing of restaurant mood lighting.
• Eric and Calvin also claim to have had all sorts of useful exchanges about the state of other projects, and learned a lot about where to look for more info about debian bootstrap and archive mirroring from steven and lamby
• Phil Hands came by to say hi and worked on testing d-i on jenkins.debian.net.
• Chris West (Faux) worked on extending misc.git:has-only.py, and started looking at Britney.

We had a Debian focussed meeting where we discussed a number of topics:

• IRC meetings: yes, we want to try again to have them, monthly, a poll for a good date is being held.
• Debian tests post Stretch: we'll add tests for stable/Stretch.
• .buildinfo files, how forward: we need sourceful uploads for any arch:all packages. dak should send .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
• (pre?) Stretch release press release: we should do that, esp. as our achievements are largely unrelated to Stretch.
• Reproducible Builds Summit 3: yes, we want that.
• what to do (in notes.git) with resolved issues: keep the issues.
• strip-nondeterminism quo vadis: Justin reminded us that strip-nondeterminism is a workaround we want to get rid off.

And then we also had a lot of fun in the hackerspace, enjoying some of their gimmicks, such as being able to open physical doors with ssh or controlling light and music with an webbrowser without authentication (besides being in the right network). (This wasn't the hackathon per-se, but some of us appreciated these sights and so we thought you would too.) Many thanks to:

• Debian for sponsoring food and accomodation!
• Dock Europe for providing us with really nice accomodation in the house!
• CCC Hamburg for letting us use their hackerspace for >3 days non-stop!

News and media coverage openSUSE has had a security breach in their infrastructure, including their build services. As of this writing, the scope and impact are still unclear, however the incident illustrates that no one should rely on being able to secure their infrastructure at all times. Reproducible Builds help mitigate this by allowing independent verification of build results, by parties that are unaffected by the compromise. (Whilst this can happen to anyone. Kudos to openSUSE for being open about it. Now let's continue working on Reproducible Builds everywhere!) On May 13th Chris Lamb gave a talk on Reproducible Builds at OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania. Toolchain bug reports and fixes

• Chris Lamb:
  • Fixed a long-standing toolchain issue (#842635, #858389) in docbook-to-man by adopting the package.
  • #862003 filed against debhelper.
  • #862073 filed against ftp.debian.org, to upload buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
• Steven Chamberlain:
  • #862059 filed against sbuild, for signing buildinfo files.
• Ximin Luo:
  • #862112 filed against r-base.
  • #862113 filed against gcc-6.
  • #862116 filed against dpkg.

Packages' bug reports

• Chris Lamb:
  • #862088 filed against compass-h5bp-plugin.
  • #862140 filed against ofxstatement-plugins.
  • #862179 filed against acct.
  • #862183 filed against libjgroups-java.
  • #862195 filed against sendip.
  • #862451 filed against wammu, forwarded upstream.
  • #862484 filed against seqan2.
  • #862553 filed against vim-command-t.
  • #862588 filed against tkhtml1.
  • #862592 filed against taskcoach.
• Chris West:
  • #862252 filed against dns-root-data.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 11 package reviews have been added, 2562 have been updated and 278 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Most of the updates were to move ~1800 packages affected by the generic catch-all captures_build_path (out of ~2600 total) to the more specific gcc_captures_build_path, fixed by our proposed patches to GCC. 5 issue types have been updated:

• Updated docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta
• Added ocaml_captures_build_path
• Added gcj_captures_build_path
• Added gcc_captures_build_path
• Re-added docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (2)
• Chris West (1)

diffoscope development diffoscope development continued on the experimental branch:

• Maria Glukhova:
  • Code refactoring and more tests.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add safeguards against unpacking recursive or deeply-nested archives. (Closes: #780761)

strip-nondeterminism development

• strip-nondeterminism 0.033-1 and -2 were uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • Add cpio handler.
  • Code quality improvements.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add documentation and increase verbosity, in support of the long-term aim of removing the need for this tool.

reprotest development

• reprotest 0.6.1 and 0.6.2 were uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from:
• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a documentation section on "Known bugs".
  • Move developer documentation away from the man page.
  • Mention release instructions in the previous changelog.
  • Preserve directory structure when copying artifacts. Otherwise hash output on a successful reproduction sometimes fails, because find(1) can't find the artifacts using the original artifact_pattern.
• Chris Lamb
  • Add proper release instructions and a keyring.

trydiffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Uses the diffoscope from Debian experimental if possible.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Debian has many years of history, about 25 years already. With such a long travel over the continous field of developing our Universal Operating System, some myths, false accusations and bad reputation has arisen. Today I had the opportunity to discuss this topic, I was invited to give a Debian talk in the 11 Concurso Universitario de Software Libre , a Spanish contest for students to develop and dig a bit into free-libre open source software (and hardware). In this talk, I walked through some of the most common Debian myths, and I would like to summarize here some of them, with a short explanation of why I think they should be debunked. myth #1: Debian is old software Please, use testing or stable-backports. If you use Debian stable your system will in fact be stable and that means: updates contain no new software but only fixes. myth #2: Debian is slow We compile and build most of our packages with industry-standard compilers and options. I don t see a significant difference on how fast linux kernel or mysql run in a CentOS or in Debian. myth #3: Debian is difficult I already discussed about this issue back in Jan 2017, Debian is a puzzle: difficult. myth #4: Debian has no graphical environment This is, simply put, false. We have gnome, kde, xfce and more. The basic Debian installer asks you what do you want at install time. myth #5: since Debian isn t commercial, the quality is poor Did you know that most of our package developers are experts in their packages and in their upstream code? Not all, but most of them. Besides, many package developers get paid to do their Debian job. Also, there are external companies which do indeed offer support for Debian (see freexian for example). myth #6: I don t trust Debian Why? Did we do something to gain this status? If so, please let us know. You don t trust how we build or configure our packages? You don t trust how we work? Anyway, I m sorry, you have to trust someone if you want to use any kind of computer. Supervising every single bit of your computer isn t practical for you. Please trust us, we do our best. myth #7: nobody uses Debian I don t agree. Many people use Debian. They even run Debian in the International Space Station. Do you count derivatives, such as Ubuntu? I believe this myth is just pointless, but some people out there really think nobody uses Debian. myth #8: Debian uses systemd Well, this is true. But you can run sysvinit if you want. I prefer and recommend systemd though :-) myth #9: Debian is only for servers No. See myths #1, #2 and #4. You may download my slides in PDF and in ODP format (only in Spanish, sorry for English readers).

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 23 and Saturday April 29 2017: Past and upcoming events On April 26th Chris Lamb gave a talk at foss-north 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden on Reproducible Builds. Between May 5th-7th the Reproducible Builds Hackathon 2017 will take place in Hamburg, Germany. Then on May 26th Bernhard M. Wiedemann will give a talk titled reproducible builds in openSUSE (2017) at the openSUSE Conference 2017 in N rnberg, Germany. Media coverage Already on April 19th Sylvain Beucler wrote a yet another follow-up post Practical basics of reproducible builds 3, after part 1 and part 2 of his series. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Woerister of the Rust project has implemented file maps that affect all path-related compiler information, including "error messages, metadata, debuginfo, and the file!() macro alike". Ximin Luo with support from some other Rust developers and contributors helped steer the final result into something that was compatible with reproducible builds. Many thanks to all involved, especially for the patience of discussing this over several months. Ximin wrote a first-attempt patch to fix R build-path issues. It made 460/477 R packages reproducible, but also caused 3 of these to FTBFS. See randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases for details. Bugs filed and patches sent upstream Chris Lamb:

• #861133 filed against tf.
• #861443 filed against ora2pg.

Bernhard M. Wiedemann filed a number of patches upstream:

• intltool
• xine-ui
• tboot
• javapackages
• mxml, which got merged already.
• calibre, also merged.
• wammu, merged as well.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 102 package reviews have been added, 64 have been updated and 24 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated:

• Added captures_build_path_in_beam_files, recategorise some erlang packages with captures_build_path into this issue instead.
• Removed timestamps_in_beam_files.
• Holger started reviewing blacklisted_on_jenkins and blacklisted_on_jenkins_armhf_only and found quite some packages which don't need to be blacklisted anymore.

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (4)
• Santiago Vila (2)

diffoscope development diffoscope 82 was uploaded to experimental by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add support for Ogg Vorbis files.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Add support for .dtb (device tree blob) files. (Closes: #861109).

Changes from previous weeks that were also released with 82:

• Ximin Luo
  • Add support for R .rds and .rdb object files.
• Chris Lamb
  • Add support for comparing Pcap files.
  • Add support for .docx and .odt files via docx2txt & odt2txt.
  • Add support for PGP files via pgpdump.
  • Various documentation and test improvements.
  • Various bug fixes and code quality improvements.
• Sylvain Beucler
  • Display differences in zip platform-specific timestamps.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 2 and Saturday April 8 2017: Media coverage

• Daniel Peebles reported that tar still has problem with deterministic output and long filenames.
• Dustin Kirkland wrote a blog post referencing reproducible builds as a followup to a recent thread on Hacker News.

Toolchain development and fixes

• Ximin Luo uploaded custom version of GCC6 to our repository to test BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP patches.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 27 package reviews have been added, 14 have been updated and 17 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (2)

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Chris Lamb added support for a .bz2 version of reproducible.json, available at https://reproducible.debian.net/reproducible.json.bz2
• FreeGeek donated a network switch to make room for some additional boards on the armhf build network.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Vagrant Cascadian & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

A Survey of Propaganda

an excellent survey article on modern propaganda techniques, how they work, and how we might defend ourselves against them. As to defense: "Debunking doesn't work: provide an alternative narrative."

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Karen M Sandler (karen)
• Sebastien Badia (sbadia)
• Christos Trochalakis (ctrochalakis)
• Adrian Bunk (bunk)
• Michael Lustfield (mtecknology)
• James Clarke (jrtc27)
• Sean Whitton (spwhitton)
• Jerome Georges Benoit (calculus)
• Daniel Lange (dlange)
• Christoph Biedl (cbiedl)
• Gustavo Panizzo (gefa)
• Gert Wollny (gewo)
• Benjamin Barenblat (bbaren)
• Giovani Augusto Ferreira (giovani)
• Mechtilde Stehmann (mechtilde)
• Christopher Stuart Hoskin (mans0954)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Dmitry Bogatov
• Dominik George
• Gordon Ball
• Sruthi Chandran
• Michael Shuler
• Filip Pytloun
• Mario Anthony Limonciello
• Julien Puydt
• Nicholas D Steeves
• Raoul Snyman

Congratulations!

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 18 and Saturday December 24 2016: Media coverage 100% Of The 289 Coreboot Images Are Now Built Reproducibly by Phoronix, with more details in German by Pro-Linux.de. We have further reports on our Reproducible Builds World summit #2 in Berlin from Rok Garbas of NixOS as well as Clemens Lang of MacPorts Debian infrastructure work Dak now archives buildinfo files thanks to a patch from Chris Lamb. We also have mostly finalised a design of how they will be distributed by the Debian FTP mirror network which we will start implementing soon. This is great for the future of Debianb but unfortunately this also means that we won't have .buildinfo files for Stretch as Debian will not rebuild its source packages and because these binary packages currently in the archive were mostly built with dpkg > 1.18.11. reprepro/5.0.0-1 has added support for dealing with .buildinfo files that are included in .changes files. (Closes: #843402) Reproducible work in other projects The Chromium project is now working on making their build process (mostly) deterministic. Their motivation is to save both "[money] (less hardware is required) and developer time (reduced latency by having less work to do on the TS and CI)". Unreproducible bugs filed

• Chris Lamb:
  • #848721 filed against apt.
  • #848866 filed against libcorelinux.
  • #849314 filed against node-gulp.
  • #849333 filed against faker.
• Dhole:
  • #848633 filed against sugar-toolkit-gtk3.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 39 package reviews have been added, 75 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated:

• Updated captures_build_path
• Added nondeterministic_ordering_in_desktop_files_by_python_sugar3

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (7)
• Lucas Nussbaum (4)

diffoscope development diffoscope 66 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Emanuel Bronshtein:
  • Use ssh-keygen for comparing OpenSSH public keys
  • Use js-beautify as JavaScript code beautifier for .js files (with tests).
  • Many CSS & HTML improvements.
  • Change all HTTP URLs to HTTPS where applicable.
• anthraxx:
  • Enable the use of ssh-keygen on Arch Linux.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Add detection of order-only difference in plain text format. (Closes: #848049)
  • Change icc-recognizing regexp to reflect changes in file type description. (Closes: #848814)
• Chris Lamb:
  • Update tests for compatibility with enjarify >= 1.0.3. (Closes: #849142)
  • When skipping tests because the version of an external is too low, print the detected version.
  • Avoid unpacking packages twice when comparing .changes. (Closes: #843531)
  • Add a simple profiling framework (enabled via --profile).
  • Various code quality and reliability improvements.
  • Document how to sign PyPI uploads.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.029-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included no new content from this week, but rather included contributions from previous weeks. reproducible-website development The website is now also accessible via the https://www.reproducible-builds.org URL.

• Clemens Lang:
  • Add the definition of "reproducible", as drafted at the reproducible builds world summit in Berlin. Thanks to all participants in the sessions that worked these out!
• Valerie R Young:
  • Force ordering of titles.
  • Various formatting improvements.
• Holger Levsen:
  • Various usability and formatting improvements.
  • https://www.reproducible-builds.org
• Chris Lamb:
  • Various usability, style and wording improvements.
  • Add Debconf15, Skroutz.gz and MiniDebconfCambridge15 talks to resouces page.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• We changed the data storage backend from a single sqlite3 database file (651 MB) to a PostgreSQL database. With this change we'll be able to scale a lot more and add testing of the arm64 architecture.
  • Valerie Young wrote most of the code, Mattia Rizzolo reviewed and helped improve the code and Holger deployed it and found some minor bugs which have been fixed.
• We are now testing the arm64 architecture for all packages on all suites, arranged by Holger. Many thanks to codethink for providing us with access to eight 8-core arm64 machines with 64GB memory, which allows us to rebuild Debian very fast!

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing lists.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Android

• Chris Lamb was so kind to send in a patch for apktool to make the build reproducible (#845475). Although this was not enough to fix the issue it set me on the right path to eventually resolve bug number 845475.

Debian Games

• I packaged a couple of new upstream releases for extremetuxracer, fifechan, fife, unknown-horizons, freeciv, atanks and armagetronad. Most notably fifechan was accepted by the FTP team which allowed me to package new versions of fife and unknown-horizons which are both back in testing again. I expect that upstream will make their final release sometime in December. Atanks has been orphaned a while ago and since upstream is still active and I kinda like the game I decided to adopt it. I also uploaded a backport of Freeciv 2.5.6 to jessie-backports.
• In November we received a bunch of RC bug reports again because, hey, it is almost time for the Freeze, let s break some packages. Thus I spent some time fixing freeorion (#843132), pokerth (#843078), simutrans (#828545), freeciv (#844198) and warzone2100 (#844870).
• I also updated the debian-games blend, we are at version 1.6 now, and made some smaller adjustments. The most important change was adding a new binary package, games-all, that installs..well, all! I know this will make at least one person on this planet happy. Actually I was kind of forced into adding it because blends-dev automatically creates it as a requirement for choosing blends with the Debian Installer. But don t be afraid games-all only recommends games-finest, the rest is suggested.
• Last but not least I worked on performous and could close a wishlist bug report (#425898). The submitter asked to suggest some free song packages for this karaoke game.

Debian Java

• I sponsored uncommons-watchmaker for Kai-Chung and also reviewed libnative-platform-java and granted upload rights to him.
• I packaged new upstream releases of lombok-patcher, electric, undertow, sweethome3d and sweethome3d-furniture-editor.
• I spent quite some time on reviewing (especially the copyright review took most of the time) and improving the packaging for tycho (#816604) which is a precondition for packaging the latest upstream release of Eclipse, a popular Java IDE. Luca Vercelli has been working on it for the last couple of months and he did most of the initial packaging. Unfortunately I was only able to upload the package last week which means that the chances for updating Eclipse for Stretch are slim.
• Due to time constraints I could not finish the Netbeans update in time which I had started back in October. This is on my priority list for December now.
• Several security issues were reported against Tomcat 6,7,8 . I helped with reviewing some of the patches that Emmanuel prepared for Jessie and worked on fixing the same bugs in Wheezy.

Debian LTS This was my ninth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 11 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 14. November until 21. November I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged bugs in teeworlds, libdbd-mysql-perl, bash, libxml2, tiff, firefox-esr, drupal7, moin, libgc, w3m and sniffit.
• DLA-715-1. Issued a security update for drupal7 fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-717-1. Issued a security update for moin fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-728-1. Issued a security update for tomcat6 fixing 8 CVE. (Debian bug #845385 was assigned a CVE later).
• DLA-729-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 8 CVE. (Debian bug #845385 was assigned a CVE later).
• Especially the patches and the subsequent testing for CVE-2016-0762 and CVE-2016-6816 required most of the time.

Non-maintainer uploads

• I uploaded an NMU for angband to fix #837394. The patch was kindly prepared by Adrian Bunk.

It is already this time of the year again. See you next year for another report.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Android

• I sponsored and reviewed android-platform-external-libunwind and android-platform-frameworks-base for Kai-Chung. Two more packages, android-framework-23 and android-platform-tools-swt, are currently waiting in the NEW queue and hopefully they become available soon. Kai-Chung also became Debian Maintainer this month and I granted him upload permissions for android-platform-tools-base for a start. Congratulations.
• I packaged a new upstream release of apktool (2.2.1).

Debian Games

• I fixed RC bugs in lordsawar (#839323) and doomsday (#839338).
• I packaged new upstream releases of atanks, lordsawar, blockattack and peg-e.
• I completed the Bullet transition (#839243). Bullet 2.85 has also been released this month but it is now too late for Stretch because the transition freeze is already on the 5th of November. I expect more point releases a la 2.85.x during the coming weeks and I intend to provide an updated package in experimental soon.
• I did some cleanups, package upgrades and bug fixes for box2d and redeclipse (apparently redeclipse-server requires the -data package to be present now).
• I uploaded Redeclipse 1.5.6 to jessie-backports in the hope that more players will be able to connect to the multiplayer servers. Unfortunately network compatibility breaks rather frequently.
• I applied a patch from Gianfranco Costamagna to address an Multiarch installation issue (#841824) in FreeOrion.

Debian Java

• This month I tended to upgrade more Java packages including new upstream releases of libjide-oss-java, activemq, easymock, libapache-mod-jk, svnkit, sweethome3d-furniture-editor, sweethome3d-textures-editor, sweethome3d-furniture, sweethome3d, sweethome3d-furniture-nonfree, maven-enforcer, bsaf, libjcommon-java, libjfreechart-java, libcsv-java, jansi, jansi-native, jboss-xnio and undertow.
• The update of maven-enforcer caused a regression in its reverse-dependencies (#841197) and required a patch and upload of another revision. The Jfreechart library upgrade also required a compatibility patch for statcvs.
• I updated stegosuite and fixed an incorrect Section field in debian/control.
• I updated the Debian packaging of libjgraph-java and libjemmy2-java.
• I decided to work on getting Eclipse into shape again. The current version is outdated and affected by several bugs at the moment and I really think it should not be released with Stretch. The new version though requires a major package update because the build system is Maven based now. Luca Vercelli already worked on sat4j and Tycho, two preconditions for packaging Eclipse. I reviewed sat4j and uploaded an NMU (#815911) later. I m still working on Tycho (#816604) and I hope to finish it soon.
• Netbeans 8.2 was released. I have already completed the work on libnb-platform18-java (updated package is available in Git) but I haven t started yet with netbeans itself. I intend to continue the fun in November.

Debian LTS This was my eight month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 10. October until 17. October I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged bugs in libgd2, graphicsmagick, libxrender, mupdf, libxfixes, guile-2.0, glance, inspircd, libxi, libxv, libxst, spip, libxml2, libarchive and jasper.
• DLA-648-1. Issued a security update for c-ares fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-664-1. Issued a security update for libxrender fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-666-1. Issued a security update for guile-2.0 fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-667-1. Issued a security update for libxv fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-668-1. Issued a security update for libass fixing 2 CVE. I triaged CVE-2016-7970 and marked the version in Wheezy as not affected.
• DLA-673-1. Issued a security update for kdepimlibs fixing 1 CVE.

Non-maintainer uploads

• I fixed various RC bugs in gnudoq and xsok which are not maintained by the Games Team. The following games are available in Stretch again: gnudoq (#817296, #817484), xsok (#817738) and I also worked on four more bug fixes to improve the game s desktop integration and internationalization support.
• I fixed another RC bug in trackballs (#831119) but while I was working on the update I discovered that the game frequently segfaults which makes it kind of unplayable (#839788). I haven t found a solution yet but I suspect the switch to guile-2.0 and related patches introduced this behavior.

QA

• I uploaded a new revision of criticalmass and applied a patch from Adrian Bunk to fix #811816, a FTBFS.
• I triaged an RC bug for raptor2 (#824735) and the issue could be closed after the bug reporter confirmed that raptor2 built fine again.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 25 and Saturday October 1 2016: Statistics For the first time, we reached 91% reproducible packages in our testing framework on testing/amd64 using a determistic build path. (This is what we recommend to make packages in Stretch reproducible.) For unstable/amd64, where we additionally test for reproducibility across different build paths we are at almost 76% again. IRC meetings We have a poll to set a time for a new regular IRC meeting. If you would like to attend, please input your available times and we will try to accommodate for you. There was a trial IRC meeting on Friday, 2016-09-31 1800 UTC. Unfortunately, we did not activate meetbot. Despite this participants consider the meeting a success as several topics where discussed (eg changes to IRC notifications of tests.r-b.o) and the meeting stayed within one our length. Upcoming events Reproduce and Verify Filesystems - Vincent Batts, Red Hat - Berlin (Germany), 5th October, 14:30 - 15:20 @ LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe 2016. From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE & coreboot - Holger "h01ger" Levsen and Alexander "lynxis" Couzens - Berlin (Germany), 13th October, 11:00 - 11:25 @ OpenWrt Summit 2016. Introduction to Reproducible Builds - Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the SeaGL.org Conference In Seattle (USA), November 11th-12th, 2016. Previous events GHC Determinism - Bartosz Nitka, Facebook - Nara (Japan), 24th September, ICPF 2016. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Meskes uploaded bsdmainutils/9.0.11 to unstable with a fix for #830259 based on Reiner Herrmann's patch. This fixed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder issue in the affected packages (freebsd-libs, mmh). devscripts/2.16.8 was uploaded to unstable. It includes a debrepro script by Antonio Terceiro which is similar in purpose to reprotest but more lightweight; specific to Debian packages and without support for virtual servers or configurable variations. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible in our testing framework after being fixed:

• ara/1.0.32 by Chris Lamb, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fracplanet/0.4.0-5 by Chris Lamb, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
• gnarwl/3.6.dfsg-8 by Bernhard Schmidt, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• kgb-bot/1.34-1 by gregor herrmann, original patch by gregor herrmann.
• survex/1.2.29-1 by Olly Betts.
• zpaq/1.10-3 by Chris Lamb, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
• fig2dev/1:3.2.6-3 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• luxio/11-1 by Daniel Silverstone.
• monkeysign/2.1.1 by Antoine Beaupr , original patch by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• openarena-085-data/0.8.5split-9 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-088-data/0.8.8-7 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-data/0.8.5split-9 by Simon McVittie.
• rc/1.7.4-1 by Reiner Herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• gkrellm/2.3.8-1 by Sandro Tosi
• glassfish/1:2.1.1-b31g+dfsg1-4 by Emmanuel Bourg

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• apache2/2.4.23-5 by Rapha l Hertzog
• freeradius/3.0.11+dfsg-1 by Michael Stapelberg
• libnss-ldap/265-4 by Chris Lamb
• lift/2.5.0-1 by Nicolas Delvaux
• linux/4.8~rc8-1~exp1 by Ben Hutchings
• nose2/0.6.5-2 by Barry Warsaw
• postgresql-9.6/9.6.0-1 Christoph Berg
• strace/4.13-0.1 by Nicolas Braud-Santoni
• yersinia/0.7.3-3 by No l K the

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #838888 filed against dh-haskell by Chris Lamb.
• #838971 filed against slang2 by Chris Lamb.
• #839587 filed against sympa by Chris Lamb.
• #839181 filed against transmission-remote-gtk by Chris Lamb.
• #838829 filed against vala by Sebastian Reichel.
• #838970 filed against webkit2pdf by Chris Lamb.
• #831569 filed against websockets by Chris Lamb.
• #839347 filed against xml-core by Lucas Nussbaum.
• #839526 filed against xml-core by Adrian Bunk.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 77 package reviews have been added, 178 have been updated and 80 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 6 issue types have been updated:

• Added clilibs_line_order, records_build_flags and hevea_captures_build_path.
• Removed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder, fixed in bsdmainutils/9.0.11.
• Updated diffoscope_runs_forever, captures_build_path.

Weekly QA work As part of reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (3)
• Chris Lamb (12)
• Lucas Nussbaum (3)
• Sebastian Reichel (1)

diffoscope development A new version of diffoscope 61 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Ximin Luo:
  • Improve the CLI --help text and add an --output-empty option.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add a progress bar and show it if stdout is a TTY. You can read more about it here. It can also be read by higher-level programs via the --status-fd CLI option.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Behaviour improvements in the case of OS-level errors.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Testing and packaging improvements.

Post-release there were further contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Code architecture improvements.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Testing improvements.

reprotest development A new version of reprotest 0.3.2 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from:

• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a --diffoscope-arg CLI option to pass extra args to diffoscope.

Post-release there were further contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Code quality improvements.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Hans-Christoph Steiner continued work on setting up reproducible tests for F-Droid.
• Holger cleaned up the script creating the page showing breakages, so that it now also cleans up some of the breakage it finds.
• IRC notifications about diffoscope crashes and artifacts available for investigations have been dropped; instead the breakages page has a permanent pointer. (h01ger)
• IRC notifications from the automatic package scheduler and status changes for packages have been moved -- as a temporary trial -- to #debian-reproducible-changes on irc.oftc.net (Mattia).

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

A Few Useful Mental Tools from Richard Feynman [archive]

These tricks show Feynman taking the method of thought he learned in pure science and applying it to the more mundane topics most of us have to deal with every day.

Pasta [archive]

A comprehensive introduction to pasta, to keep at hand in case I meet someone who has little familiarity with it.

MPTP: One Designer Drug and Serendipity [archive]

Abstract: Through an unlikely series of coincidences and fortunate accidents, the development of Parkinson s disease in several illicit drug users was traced to their use of a meperidine analog contaminated with 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP). The discovery of a chemical capable of producing animal models of the disease has revitalized research efforts and resulted in important new information. The serendipitous finding also prompted consideration of what changes seem advisable if designer drugs are to be dealt with more efficaciously.

The Debunking Handbook: now freely available for download

The Debunking Handbook, a guide to debunking misinformation, is now freely available to download. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there's no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths.

Faulty neon light jams radio appliances [archive]

An apparent interference source began plaguing wireless vehicle key fobs, cell phones, and other wireless electronics. Key fob owners found they could not open or start their vehicles remotely until their vehicles were towed at least a block away, nor were they able to call for help on their cell phones when problems occurred

Calvin & Muad'Dib

Calvin & Hobbes with text taken from Frank Herbert's Dune. It's been around since 2013 and I consistently found it moving and deep.

When Birds Attack - Bike Helmet Hacks [archive]

Australian magpies attacking cyclists has propted several creative adaptations, including attaching an afro wig to the bike helmet.

I recently dug through my history of involvement with TeX (Live), and found out that in January there are a lot of anniversaries I should celebrate: 14 years ago I started building binaries for TeX Live, 11 years ago I proposed the packaging TeX Live for Debian, 10 years ago the TeX Live packages entered Debian. There are other things to celebrate next year (2017), namely the 10 year anniversary of the (not so new anymore) infrastructure in short tlmgr of TeX Live packaging, but this will come later. In this blog post I want to concentrate on my involvement in TeX Live and Debian. Those of you not interested in boring and melancholic look-back onto history can safely skip reading this one. For those a bit interested in the history of TeX in Debian, please read on. Debian releases and TeX systems The TeX system of choice has been for long years teTeX, curated by Thomas Esser. Digging through the Debian Archive and combining it with changelog entries as well as personal experiences since I joined Debian, here is a time line of TeX in Debian, all to my best knowledge.

Date	Version	Name	teTeX/TeX Live	Maintainers
1993-96	<1	?	?	Christoph Martin
6/1996	1.1	Buzz	?
12/1996	1.2	Rec	?
6/1997	1.3	Bo	teTeX 0.4
7/1998	2.0	Ham	teTeX 0.9
3/1999	2.1	Slink	teTeX 0.9.9N
8/2000	2.2	Potato	teTeX 1.0
7/2002	3.0	Woody	teTeX 1.0
6/2005	3.1	Sarge	teTeX 2.0	Atsuhito Kohda
4/2007	4.0	Etch	teTeX 3.0, TeX Live 2005	Frank K ster, NP
2/2009	5.0	Lenny	TeX Live 2007	NP
2/2011	6.0	Squeeze	TeX Live 2009
5/2013	7.0	Whezzy	TeX Live 2012
4/2015	8.0	Jessie	TeX Live 2014
???	???	Stretch	TeX Live 2015

The history of TeX in Debian is thus split more or less in 10 years teTeX, and 10 years TeX Live. While I cannot check back to the origins, my guesses are that already in the very first releases (te)TeX was included. The first release I can confirm (via the Debian archive) shipping teTeX is the release Bo (June 1997). Maintainership during the first 10 years showed some fluctuation: The first years/releases (till about 2002) were dominated by Christoph Martin with Adrian Bunk and few others, who did most packaging work on teTeX version 1. After this Atsuhito Kohda with help from Hilmar Preusse and some people brought teTeX up to version 2, and from 2004 to 2007 Frank K ster, again with help of Hilmar Preusse and some other, took over most of the work on teTeX. Other names appearing throughout the changelog are (incomplete list) Julian Gilbey, Ralf Stubner, LaMont Jones, and C.M Connelly (and many more bug-reporters and fixers). Looking at the above table I have to mention the incredible amount of work that both Atsuhito Kohda and Frank K ster have put into the teTeX packages, and many of their contributions have been carried over into the TeX Live packages. While there haven t been many releases during their maintainership, their work has inspired and supported the packaging of TeX Live to a huge extend. Start of TeX Live I got involved in TeX Live back in 2002 when I started building binaries for the alpha-linux architecture. I can t remember when I first had the idea to package TeX Live for Debian, but here is a time line from my first email to the Debian Developers mailing list concerning TeX Live, to the first accepted upload:

Date	Subject/Link	Comment
2005-01-11	binaries for different architectures in debian packages	The first question concerning packaging TeX Live, about including pre-built binaries
2005-01-25	Debian-TeXlive Proposal II	A better proposal, but still including pre-built binaries
2005-05-17	Proposal for a tex-base package	Proposal for tex-base, later tex-common, as basis for both teTeX and TeX live packages
2015-06-10	Bug#312897: ITP: texlive	ITP bug for TeX Live
2005-09-17	Re: Take over of texinfo/info packages	Taking over texinfo which was somehow orphaned started here
2005-11-28	Re: texlive-basic_2005-1_i386.changes REJECTED	My answer to the rejection by ftp-master of the first upload. This email sparked a long discussion about packaging and helped improve the naming of packages (but not really the packaging itself).
2006-01-12	Upload of TeX Live 2005-1 to Debian	The first successful upload
2006-01-22	Accepted texlive-base 2005-1 (source all)	TeX Live packages accepted into Debian/experimental

One can see from the first emails that at that time I didn t have any idea about Debian packaging and proposed to ship the binaries built within the TeX Live system on Debian. What followed was first a long discussion about whether there is any need for just another TeX system. The then maintainer Frank K ster took a clear stance in favor of including TeX Live, and after several rounds of proposals, tests, rejections and improvements, the first successful upload of TeX Live packages to Debian/experimental happened on 12 January 2006, so exactly 10 years ago. Packaging Right from the beginning I used a meta-packaging approach. That is, instead of working directly with the source packages, I wrote (Perl) scripts that generated the source packages from a set of directives. There were several reasons why I choose to introduce this extra layer:

• The original format of the TeX Live packaging information (tpm) were xml files that were parsed with an XML parser (libxml). I guess (from what I have seen over the years) I was the only one ever properly parsing these .tpm files for packaging.
• TeX Live packages were often reshuffled, and Debian package name changed, which would have caused a certain level of pain for the creation of original tar files and packaging.
• Flexibility in creating additional packages and arbitrary dependencies

Till now I am not 100% sure whether it was the best idea, but the scripts remain in place till now, only adapted to the new packaging paradigm in TeX Live (without xml) and adding new functionality. This allows me to just kick off one script that does do all the work, including building .orig.tar.gz, source packages, binary packages. For those interested to follow the frantic activity during the first years, there is a file CHANGES.packaging which for the years from 2005 to 2011 documents very extensively the changes I made in these years. I don t want to count the hours the went into all this Development over the years TeX Live 2005 was just another TeX system but not the preferred one in Debian Etch and beyond. But then in May 2006, Thomas Esser announced the end of development of teTeX, which cleared the path for TeX Live as main TeX system in Debian (and the world!). The next release of Debian, Lenny (1/2009), already carried only TeX Live. Unfortunately it was only TeX Live 2007 and not 2008, mostly due to me having been involved in rewriting the upstream infrastructure based on Debian package files instead of the notorious xml files. This took quite a lot of attention and time from Debian away to upstream development, but this will be discussed in a different post. Similarly, the release of TeX Live included in Debian Squeeze (released 2/2011) was only TeX Live 2009 (instead of 2010), but since then (Wheezy and Jessie) the releases of TeX Live in Debian were always the latest released ones. Current status Since about 2013 I am trying to keep a regular schedule of new TeX Live packages every month. These helps me to keep up with the changes in upstream packaging and reduces the load of packaging a new release of TeX Live. It also bring to users of unstable and testing a very up-to-date TeX system, where packages at most lack 1 month of behind the TeX Live net updates. Future As most of the readers here know, besides caring for TeX (Live) and related packages in Debian, I am also responsible for the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) and most of upstream s infrastructure including network distribution. Thus, my (spare, outside work) time needs to be distributed between all these projects (and some others) which leaves less and less time for Debian packaging. Fortunately the packaging is in a state that making regular updates once a month is less of a burden, since most steps are automatized. What is still a bit of a struggle is adapting the binary package (src:texlive-bin) to new releases. But also this has become simpler due to less invasive changes over the years. All in all, I don t have many plans for TeX Live in Debian besides keeping the current system running as it is. Search for and advise to future maintainers and collaborators I would be more than happy if new collaborators appear, with fresh ideas and some spare time. Unfortunately, my experience over these 10 years with people showing up and proposing changes (anyone remembers the guy proposing a complete rewrite in ML or so?) is that nobody really wants to invest time and energy, but search for quick solutions. This is not something that will work with a package like TeX Live, sized of several gigabyte (the biggest in the Debian archive), and complicated inner workings. I advise everyone being interested in helping to package TeX Live for Debian, to first install normal TeX Live from TUG, get used to what actions happen during updates (format rebuilds, hyphenation patters, map file updates). One does not need to have a perfect understanding of what exactly happens down there in the guts (I didn t have in the beginning, either), but if you want to help packaging and never heard about what format dumps or map files are, then this might be a slight obstacle. Conclusion TeX Live is the only TeX system in wide use across lots of architectures and operating systems, and the only comparable system, MikTeX, is Windows specific (also there are traces of ports to Unix). Backed by all the big user groups of TeX, TeX Live will remain the prime choice for the foreseeable future, and thus also TeX Live in Debian.

I have to agree with John Burnside on that statement, after having recently moved house again rediscovering our book collection has been a salve for an otherwise exhausting undertaking. I returned to Cambridge four years ago, initially on my own and then subsequently the family moved down to be with me.

We rented a house but, with two growing teenagers, the accommodation was becoming a little crowded. Melodie and I decided the relocation was permanent and started looking for our own property, eventually finding something to our liking in Cottenham village.

Melodie took the opportunity to have the house cleaned and decorated while empty because of overlapping time with our rental property. This meant we had to be a little careful while moving in as there was still wet paint in places.

Moving weekend was made bearable by Steve, Jonathan and Jo lending a hand especially on the trips to Yorkshire to retrieve, amongst other things, the aforementioned book collection. We were also fortunate to have Andy and Jane doing many other important jobs around the place while the rest of us were messing about in vans.

The seemingly obligatory trip to IKEA to acquire furniture was made much more fun by trying to park a luton van which was only possible because Steve and Jonathan helped me. Though it turns out IKEA ship mattresses rolled up so tight they can be moved in an estate car so taking the van was unnecessary.

Having moved in it seems like every weekend is filled with a never ending "todo" list of jobs. From clearing gutters to building a desk in the study. Eight weeks on and the list seems to be slowly shrinking meaning I can even do some lower priority things like the server rack which was actually a fun project.


The holidays this year afforded me some time to finish the boys bedrooms. They both got loft beds with a substantial area underneath. This allows them both to have double beds along with a desk and plenty of storage. Completing the rooms required the construction of some flat pack furniture which rather than simply do myself I supervised the boys doing it themselves.

Teaching them by letting them get on with it was a surprisingly effective and both of them got the hang of the construction method pretty quickly. There was only a couple of errors from which they learned immediately and did not repeat (draw bottoms having a finished side and front becomes back when you are constructing upside down)

The house is starting to feel like home and soon all the problems will fade from memory while the good will remain. Certainly our first holiday season has been comfortable here and I look forward to many more re-reading our books.

The Independent reports that David Cameron wishes to ban the instant messaging application WhatsApp due its use of end-to-end encryption. That we might merely be pawns in manoeuvring for some future political compromise (or merely susceptible to cheap clickbait) should be cause for some concern, but what should worry us more is that if it takes scare stories about WhatsApp for our culture to awaken on the issues of privacy and civil liberties, then the central argument against surveillance was lost a long time ago. However, the situation worsens once you analyse the disapproval in more detail. One is immediately struck by a predominant narrative of technical considerations; a ban would be "unworkable" or "impractical". A robust defence of personal liberty or a warning about the insidious nature of chilling effects? Perhaps a prescient John Locke quote to underscore the case? No. An encryption ban would "cause security problems." The argument proceeds in a tediously predictable fashion: it was already difficult to keep track whether one should ipso facto be in favour of measures that benefit the economy, but we are suddenly co-opted as technocrats to consider the "damage" it could to do the recovery or the impact on a now-victimised financial sector. The coup-de-gr ce finally appeals to our already inflated self-regard and narcissism: someone could "steal your identity." Perhaps even more disappointing is the reaction from more technically-minded circles who, frankly, should know better. Here, they give the outward impression of metaphorically stockpiling copies of the GnuPG source code in their bunkers, perhaps believing the shallow techno-utopianist worldview that all social and cultural problems can probably be solved with Twitter and a JavaScript intepreter. The tragedy here is that I suspect that this isn't what the vast majority of people really believe. Given a hypothetical ban that could, somehow, bypass all of the stated concerns, I'm pretty upbeat and confident that most people would remain uncomfortable with it on some level. So what, exactly, does it take for us to oppose this kind of intervention on enduring principled grounds instead of transient and circumventable practical ones? Is the problem just a lack of vocabulary to discuss these issues on a social scale? A lack of courage? Whilst it's certainly easier to dissect illiberal measures on technical merit than to make an impassioned case for abstract freedoms, every time we gleefully cackle "it won't work" we are, in essence, conceding the central argument to the authoritarian and the censorious. If one is right but for the wrong reasons, were we even right to begin with?

A lecture at LCA 2011 which included some inappropriate slides was followed by long discussions on mailing lists. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in two lists [1]. One of the noteworthy incidents in the mailing list discussion concerned Ted Ts o (an influential member of the Linux community) debating the definition of rape. My main point on that issue in Feb 2011 was that it s insensitive to needlessly debate the statistics. Recently Valerie Aurora wrote about another aspect of this on The Ada Initiative blog [2] and on her personal blog. Some of her significant points are that conference harassment doesn t end when the conference ends (it can continue on mailing lists etc), that good people shouldn t do nothing when bad things happen, and that free speech doesn t mean freedom from consequences or the freedom to use private resources (such as conference mailing lists) without restriction. Craig Sanders wrote a very misguided post about the Ted Ts o situation [3]. One of the many things wrong with his post is his statement I m particularly disgusted by the men who intervene way too early without an explicit invitation or request for help or a clear need such as an immediate threat of violence in womens issues . I believe that as a general rule when any group of people are involved in causing a problem they should be involved in fixing it. So when we have problems that are broadly based around men treating women badly the prime responsibility should be upon men to fix them. It seems very clear that no matter what scope is chosen for fixing the problems (whether it be lobbying for new legislation, sociological research, blogging, or directly discussing issues with people to change their attitudes) women are doing considerably more than half the work. I believe that this is an indication that overall men are failing. Asking for Help I don t believe that members of minority groups should have to ask for help. Asking isn t easy, having someone spontaneously offer help because it s the right thing to do can be a lot easier to accept psychologically than having to beg for help. There is a book named Women Don t Ask which has a page on the geek feminism Wiki [4]. I think the fact that so many women relate to a book named Women Don t Ask is an indication that we shouldn t expect women to ask directly, particularly in times of stress. The Wiki page notes a criticism of the book that some specific requests are framed as complaining , so I think we should consider a complaint from a woman as a direct request to do something. The geek feminism blog has an article titled How To Exclude Women Without Really Trying which covers many aspects of one incident [5]. Near the end of the article is a direct call for men to be involved in dealing with such problems. The geek feminism Wiki has a page on Allies which includes Even a blog post helps [6]. It seems clear from public web sites run by women that women really want men to be involved. Finally when I get blog comments and private email from women who thank me for my posts I take it as an implied request to do more of the same. One thing that we really don t want is to have men wait and do nothing until there is an immediate threat of violence. There are two massive problems with that plan, one is that being saved from a violent situation isn t a fun experience, the other is that an immediate threat of violence is most likely to happen when there is no-one around to intervene. Men Don t Listen to Women Rebecca Solnit wrote an article about being ignored by men titled Men Explain Things to Me [7]. When discussing women s issues the term Mansplaining is often used for that sort of thing, the geek feminism Wiki has some background [8]. It seems obvious that the men who have the greatest need to be taught some things related to women s issues are the ones who are least likely to listen to women. This implies that other men have to teach them. Craig says that women need space to discover and practice their own strength and their own voices . I think that the best way to achieve that goal is to listen when women speak. Of course that doesn t preclude speaking as well, just listen first, listen carefully, and listen more than you speak. Craig claims that when men like me and Matthew Garrett comment on such issues we are making women s spaces more comfortable, more palatable, for men . From all the discussion on this it seems quite obvious that what would make things more comfortable for men would be for the issue to never be discussed at all. It seems to me that two of the ways of making such discussions uncomfortable for most men are to discuss sexual assault and to discuss what should be done when you have a friend who treats women in a way that you don t like. Matthew has covered both of those so it seems that he s doing a good job of making men uncomfortable I think that this is a good thing, a discussion that is comfortable and palatable for the people in power is not going to be any good for the people who aren t in power. The Voting Aspect It seems to me that when certain issues are discussed we have a social process that is some form of vote. If one person complains then they are portrayed as crazy. When other people agree with the complaint then their comments are marginalised to try and preserve the narrative of one crazy person. It seems that in the case of the discussion about Rape Apology and LCA2011 most men who comment regard it as one person (either Valeria Aurora or Matthew Garrett) causing a dispute. There is even some commentary which references my blog post about Rape Apology [9] but somehow manages to ignore me when it comes to counting more than one person agreeing with Valerie. For reference David Zanetti was the first person to use the term apologist for rapists in connection with the LCA 2011 discussion [10]. So we have a count of at least three men already. These same patterns always happen so making a comment in support makes a difference. It doesn t have to be insightful, long, or well written, merely I agree and a link to a web page will help. Note that a blog post is much better than a comment in this regard, comments are much like conversation while a blog post is a stronger commitment to a position. I don t believe that the majority is necessarily correct. But an opinion which is supported by too small a minority isn t going to be considered much by most people. The Cost of Commenting The Internet is a hostile environment, when you comment on a contentious issue there will be people who demonstrate their disagreement in uncivilised and even criminal ways. S. E. Smith wrote an informative post for Tiger Beatdown about the terrorism that feminist bloggers face [11]. I believe that men face fewer threats than women when they write about such things and the threats are less credible. I don t believe that any of the men who have threatened me have the ability to carry out their threats but I expect that many women who receive such threats will consider them to be credible. The difference in the frequency and nature of the terrorism (and there is no other word for what S. E. Smith describes) experienced by men and women gives a vastly different cost to commenting. So when men fail to address issues related to the behavior of other men that isn t helping women in any way. It s imposing a significant cost on women for covering issues which could be addressed by men for minimal cost. It s interesting to note that there are men who consider themselves to be brave because they write things which will cause women to criticise them or even accuse them of misogyny. I think that the women who write about such issues even though they will receive threats of significant violence are the brave ones. Not Being Patronising Craig raises the issue of not being patronising, which is of course very important. I think that the first thing to do to avoid being perceived as patronising in a blog post is to cite adequate references. I ve spent a lot of time reading what women have written about such issues and cited the articles that seem most useful in describing the issues. I m sure that some women will disagree with my choice of references and some will disagree with some of my conclusions, but I think that most women will appreciate that I read what women write (it seems that most men don t). It seems to me that a significant part of feminism is about women not having men tell them what to do. So when men offer advice on how to go about feminist advocacy it s likely to be taken badly. It s not just that women don t want advice from men, but that advice from men is usually wrong. There are patterns in communication which mean that the effective strategies for women communicating with men are different from the effective strategies for men communicating with men (see my previous section on men not listening to women). Also there s a common trend of men offering simplistic advice on how to solve problems, one thing to keep in mind is that any problem which affects many people and is easy to solve has probably been solved a long time ago. Often when social issues are discussed there is some background in the life experience of the people involved. For example Rookie Mag has an article about the street harassment women face which includes many disturbing anecdotes (some of which concern primary school students) [12]. Obviously anyone who has lived through that sort of thing (which means most women) will instinctively understand some issues related to threatening sexual behavior that I can t easily understand even when I spend some time considering the matter. So there will be things which don t immediately appear to be serious problems to me but which are interpreted very differently by women. The non-patronising approach to such things is to accept the concerns women express as legitimate, to try to understand them, and not to argue about it. For example the issue that Valerie recently raised wasn t something that seemed significant when I first read the email in question, but I carefully considered it when I saw her posts explaining the issue and what she wrote makes sense to me. I don t think it s possible for a man to make a useful comment on any issue related to the treatment of women without consulting multiple women first. I suggest a pre-requisite for any man who wants to write any sort of long article about the treatment of women is to have conversations with multiple women who have relevant knowledge. I ve had some long discussions with more than a few women who are involved with the FOSS community. This has given me a reasonable understanding of some of the issues (I won t claim to be any sort of expert). I think that if you just go and imagine things about a group of people who have a significantly different life-experience then you will be wrong in many ways and often offensively wrong. Just reading isn t enough, you need to have conversations with multiple people so that they can point out the things you don t understand. This isn t any sort of comprehensive list of ways to avoid being patronising, but it s a few things which seem like common mistakes. Anne Onne wrote a detailed post advising men who want to comment on feminist blogs etc [13], most of it applies to any situation where men comment on women s issues.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/10/lca2011-harassment/
• [2] http://adainitiative.org/2012/10/open-source-software-open-to-all/
• [3] http://blog.taz.net.au/2012/11/18/done/
• [4] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Women_Don t_Ask
• [5] http://geekfeminism.org/2012/09/17/how-to-exclude-women-without-really-trying/
• [6] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Allies
• [7] http://www.alternet.org/story/82222/men_explain_things_to_me
• [8] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Splaining
• [9] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/11/08/rape-apology-lca2011/
• [10] http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/ted_mail/0013.html
• [11] http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/11/on-blogging-threats-and-silence/
• [12] http://rookiemag.com/2012/05/it-happens-all-the-time/
• [13] http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2008/06/men_feminism_ne