Search Results: "chris"

30 November 2023

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2023)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

13 November 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In October, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 8.0h (out of 7.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.75h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.5h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 16.75h assigned and 1.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 9.75h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 17.0h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.75h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 17.5h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 9.75h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 1.5h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 10.75h (out of 17.75h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.0h (out of 0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 12.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.625h (out of 7.75h assigned and 8.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.375h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 13.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 7.5h (out of 11.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0.75h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In October, we have released 49 DLAs. Of particular note in the month of October, LTS contributor Chris Lamb issued DLA 3627-1 pertaining to Redis, the popular key-value database similar to Memcached, which was vulnerable to an authentication bypass vulnerability. Fixing this vulnerability involved dealing with a race condition that could allow another process an opportunity to establish an otherwise unauthorized connection. LTS contributor Markus Koschany was involved in the mitigation of CVE-2023-44487, which is a protocol-level vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol. The impacts within Debian involved multiple packages, across multiple releases, with multiple advisories being released (both DSA for stable and old-stable, and DLA for LTS). Markus reviewed patches and security updates prepared by other Debian developers, investigated reported regressions, provided patches for the aforementioned regressions, and issued several security updates as part of this. Additionally, as MariaDB 10.3 (the version originally included with Debian buster) passed end-of-life earlier this year, LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun investigating the feasibility of backporting MariaDB 10.11. The work is in early stages, with much testing and analysis remaining before a final decision can be made, as this only one of several available potential courses of action concerning MariaDB. Finally, LTS contributor Lee Garrett has invested considerable effort into the development the Functional Test Framework here. While so far only an initial version has been published, it already has several features which we intend to begin leveraging for testing of LTS packages. In particular, the FTF supports provisioning multiple VMs for the purposes of performing functional tests of network-facing services (e.g., file services, authentication, etc.). These tests are in addition to the various unit-level tests which are executed during package build time. Development work will continue on FTF and as it matures and begins to see wider use within LTS we expect to improve the quality of the updates we publish.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

11 November 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2023

Welcome to the October 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.

Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort, and this instance was no different. During this enriching event, participants had the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. A number of concrete outcomes from the summit will documented in the report for November 2023 and elsewhere. Amazingly the agenda and all notes from all sessions are already online. The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Reflections on Reflections on Trusting Trust Russ Cox posted a fascinating article on his blog prompted by the fortieth anniversary of Ken Thompson s award-winning paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust:
[ ] In March 2023, Ken gave the closing keynote [and] during the Q&A session, someone jokingly asked about the Turing award lecture, specifically can you tell us right now whether you have a backdoor into every copy of gcc and Linux still today?
Although Ken reveals (or at least claims!) that he has no such backdoor, he does admit that he has the actual code which Russ requests and subsequently dissects in great but accessible detail.

Ecosystem factors of reproducible builds Rahul Bajaj, Eduardo Fernandes, Bram Adams and Ahmed E. Hassan from the Maintenance, Construction and Intelligence of Software (MCIS) laboratory within the School of Computing, Queen s University in Ontario, Canada have published a paper on the Time to fix, causes and correlation with external ecosystem factors of unreproducible builds. The authors compare various response times within the Debian and Arch Linux distributions including, for example:
Arch Linux packages become reproducible a median of 30 days quicker when compared to Debian packages, while Debian packages remain reproducible for a median of 68 days longer once fixed.
A full PDF of their paper is available online, as are many other interesting papers on MCIS publication page.

NixOS installation image reproducible On the NixOS Discourse instance, Arnout Engelen (raboof) announced that NixOS have created an independent, bit-for-bit identical rebuilding of the nixos-minimal image that is used to install NixOS. In their post, Arnout details what exactly can be reproduced, and even includes some of the history of this endeavour:
You may remember a 2021 announcement that the minimal ISO was 100% reproducible. While back then we successfully tested that all packages that were needed to build the ISO were individually reproducible, actually rebuilding the ISO still introduced differences. This was due to some remaining problems in the hydra cache and the way the ISO was created. By the time we fixed those, regressions had popped up (notably an upstream problem in Python 3.10), and it isn t until this week that we were back to having everything reproducible and being able to validate the complete chain.
Congratulations to NixOS team for reaching this important milestone! Discussion about this announcement can be found underneath the post itself, as well as on Hacker News.

CPython source tarballs now reproducible Seth Larson published a blog post investigating the reproducibility of the CPython source tarballs. Using diffoscope, reprotest and other tools, Seth documents his work that led to a pull request to make these files reproducible which was merged by ukasz Langa.

New arm64 hardware from Codethink Long-time sponsor of the project, Codethink, have generously replaced our old Moonshot-Slides , which they have generously hosted since 2016 with new KVM-based arm64 hardware. Holger Levsen integrated these new nodes to the Reproducible Builds continuous integration framework.

Community updates On our mailing list during October 2023 there were a number of threads, including:
  • Vagrant Cascadian continued a thread about the implementation details of a snapshot archive server required for reproducing previous builds. [ ]
  • Akihiro Suda shared an update on BuildKit, a toolkit for building Docker container images. Akihiro links to a interesting talk they recently gave at DockerCon titled Reproducible builds with BuildKit for software supply-chain security.
  • Alex Zakharov started a thread discussing and proposing fixes for various tools that create ext4 filesystem images. [ ]
Elsewhere, Pol Dellaiera made a number of improvements to our website, including fixing typos and links [ ][ ], adding a NixOS Flake file [ ] and sorting our publications page by date [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian presented Reproducible Builds All The Way Down at the Open Source Firmware Conference.

Distribution work distro-info is a Debian-oriented tool that can provide information about Debian (and Ubuntu) distributions such as their codenames (eg. bookworm) and so on. This month, Benjamin Drung uploaded a new version of distro-info that added support for the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable in order to close bug #1034422. In addition, 8 reviews of packages were added, 74 were updated and 56 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.

Software development 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: In addition, Chris Lamb fixed an issue in diffoscope, where if the equivalent of file -i returns text/plain, fallback to comparing as a text file. This was originally filed as Debian bug #1053668) by Niels Thykier. [ ] This was then uploaded to Debian (and elsewhere) as version 251.

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 October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Refine the handling of package blacklisting, such as sending blacklisting notifications to the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Install systemd-oomd on all Debian bookworm nodes (re. Debian bug #1052257). [ ]
    • Detect more cases of failures to delete schroots. [ ]
    • Document various bugs in bookworm which are (currently) being manually worked around. [ ]
  • Node-related changes:
    • Integrate the new arm64 machines from Codethink. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve various node cleanup routines. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • General node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Monitoring-related changes:
    • Remove unused Munin monitoring plugins. [ ]
    • Complain less visibly about too many installed kernels. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Enhance the firewall handling on Jenkins nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Install the fish shell everywhere. [ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian added some packages and configuration for snapshot experiments. [ ]
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:

12 October 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2023

Welcome to the September 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Andreas Herrmann gave a talk at All Systems Go 2023 titled Fast, correct, reproducible builds with Nix and Bazel . Quoting from the talk description:

You will be introduced to Google s open source build system Bazel, and will learn how it provides fast builds, how correctness and reproducibility is relevant, and how Bazel tries to ensure correctness. But, we will also see where Bazel falls short in ensuring correctness and reproducibility. You will [also] learn about the purely functional package manager Nix and how it approaches correctness and build isolation. And we will see where Bazel has an advantage over Nix when it comes to providing fast feedback during development.
Andreas also shows how you can get the best of both worlds and combine Nix and Bazel, too. A video of the talk is available.
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed compatibility with file(1) version 5.45 [ ] and updated some documentation [ ]. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian extended support for GNU Guix [ ][ ] and updated the version in that distribution as well. [ ].
Yet another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. If you haven t been before, 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. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out recently, all of which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so please reach out to the organising team if you are able to help. Also note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit.
On the Reproducible Builds website, Greg Chabala updated the JVM-related documentation to update a link to the BUILDSPEC.md file. [ ] And Fay Stegerman fixed the builds failing because of a YAML syntax error.

Distribution work In Debian, this month: September saw F-Droid add ten new reproducible apps, and one existing app switched to reproducible builds. In addition, two reproducible apps were archived and one was disabled for a current total of 199 apps published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ] In addition, an extensive blog post was posted on f-droid.org titled Reproducible builds, signing keys, and binary repos .

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:

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 August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Disable armhf and i386 builds due to Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Run diffoscope with a lower ionice priority. [ ]
  • Log every build in a simple text file [ ] and create persistent stamp files when running diffoscope to ease debugging [ ].
  • Run schedulers one hour after dinstall again. [ ]
  • Temporarily use diffoscope from the host, and not from a schroot running the tested suite. [ ][ ]
  • Fail the diffoscope distribution test if the diffoscope version cannot be determined. [ ]
  • Fix a spelling error in the email to IRC gateway. [ ]
  • Force (and document) the reconfiguration of all jobs, due to the recent rise of zombies. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Deal with a rare condition when killing processes which should not be there. [ ]
  • Install the Debian backports kernel in an attempt to address Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo fixed a call to diffoscope --version (as suggested by Fay Stegerman on our mailing list) [ ], worked on an openQA credential issue [ ] and also made some changes to the machine-readable reproducible metadata, reproducible-tracker.json [ ]. Lastly, Roland Clobus added instructions for manual configuration of the openQA secrets [ ].
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:

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In September, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 7.0h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.5h (out of 7.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 18.25h (out of 18.25h assigned).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 7.75h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 13.25h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 44 DLAs. The month of September was a busy month for the LTS Team. A notable security issue fixed in September was the high-severity CVE-2023-4863, a heap buffer overflow that allowed remote attackers to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted WebP file. This CVE was covered by the three DLAs of different packages: firefox-esr, libwebp and thunderbird. The libwebp backported patch was sent to upstream, who adapted and applied it to the 0.6.1 branch. It is also worth noting that LTS contributor Markus Koschany included in his work updates to packages in Debian Bullseye and Bookworm, that are under the umbrella of the Security Team: xrdp, jetty9 and mosquitto. As every month, there was important behind-the-scenes work by the Front Desk staff, who triaged, analyzed and reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities, to decide if they warrant a security update. This is very important work, since we need to trade-off between the frequency of updates and the stability of the LTS release.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

12 September 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In August, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 18.5h (out of 18.5h assigned).
  • Anton Gladky did 7.5h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 18.5h (out of 9.0h assigned and 9.5h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 18.5h (out of 18.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 24.0h (out of 22.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 2.5h (out of 8.5h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 18.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 28.5h (out of 28.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 18.5h (out of 13.0h assigned and 5.5h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 18.5h (out of 18.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 18.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 8.75h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 12.25h (out of 0h assigned and 12.25h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In August, we have released 42 DLAs. The month of August turned out to be a rather quiet month for the LTS team. Three notable updates were to bouncycastle, openssl, and zabbix. In the case of bouncycastle a flaw allowed for the possibility of LDAP injection and the openssl update corrected a resource exhaustion bug that could result in a denial of service. Zabbix, while not widely used, was the subject of several vulnerabilities which while not individually severe did combine to result in the zabbix update being of particular note. Apart from those, the LTS team continued the always ongoing work of triaging, investigating, and fixing vulnerabilities, as well as making contributions to the broader Debian and Free Software communities.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

9 September 2023

Bits from Debian: DebianDay Celebrations and comments

Debian Celebrates 30 years! We celebrated our birthday this year and we had a great time with new friends, new members welcomed to the community, and the world. We have collected a few comments, videos, and discussions from around the Internet, and some images from some of the DebianDay2023 events. We hope that you enjoyed the day(s) as much as we did! Maqsuel Maqson

"Debian 30 years of collective intelligence" -Maqsuel Maqson Brazil Thiago Pezzo

Pouso Alegre, Brazil Daniel Pimentel

Macei , Brazil Daniel Lenharo

Curitiba, Brazil Daniel Lenharo

The cake is there. :) phls Honorary Debian Developers: Buzz, Jessie, and Woody welcome guests to this amazing party. Carlos Melara Sao Carlos, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil Carlos Melara Stickers, and Fliers, and Laptops, oh my! phls Belo Horizonte, Brazil sergiosacj Bras lia, Brazil sergiosacj Bras lia, Brazil Mexico Jathan 30 a os! Jathan A quick Selfie Jathan We do not encourage beverages on computing hardware, but this one is okay by us. Germany h01ger

30 years of love h01ger

The German Delegation is also looking for this dog who footed the bill for the party, then left mysteriously. h01ger

We took the party outside Stefano Rivera

We brought the party back inside at CCCamp Belgium Stefano Rivera

Cake and Diversity in Belgium El Salvador Gato Barato Canel n Pulgosky

Food and Fellowship in El Salvador South Africa highvoltage

Debian is also very delicious! highvoltage

All smiles waiting to eat the cake Reports Debian Day 30 years in Macei - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in S o Carlos - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Pouso Alegre - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Belo Horizonte - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Curitiba - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Bras lia - Brazil Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil Articles & Blogs Happy Debian Day - going 30 years strong - Liam Dawe Debian Turns 30 Years Old, Happy Birthday! - Marius Nestor 30 Years of Stability, Security, and Freedom: Celebrating Debian s Birthday - Bobby Borisov Happy 30th Birthday, Debian! - Claudio Kuenzier Debian is 30 and Sgt Pepper Is at Least Ninetysomething - Christine Hall Debian turns 30! -Corbet Thirty years of Debian! - Lennart Hengstmengel Debian marks three decades as 'Universal Operating System' - Sam Varghese Debian Linux Celebrates 30 Years Milestone - Joshua James 30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros - Liam Proven Looking Back on 30 Years of Debian - Maya Posch Cheers to 30 Years of Debian: A Journey of Open Source Excellence - arindam Discussions and Social Media Debian Celebrates 30 Years - Source: News YCombinator Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian ... Source: News YCombinator Comment: Congrats @debian !!! Happy Birthday! Thank you for becoming a cornerstone of the #opensource world. Here's to decades of collaboration, stability & #software #freedom -openSUSELinux via X (formerly Twitter) Comment: Today we #celebrate the 30th birthday of #Debian, one of the largest and most important cornerstones of the #opensourcecommunity. For this we would like to thank you very much and wish you the best for the next 30 years! Source: X (Formerly Twitter -TUXEDOComputers via X (formerly Twitter) Happy Debian Day! - Source: Reddit.com Video The History of Debian The Beginning - Source: Linux User Space Debian Celebrates 30 years -Source: Lobste.rs Video Debian At 30 and No More Distro Hopping! - LWDW388 - Source: LinuxGameCast Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Debian User Forums Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Linux.org

8 September 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2023

Welcome to the August 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Rust serialisation library moving to precompiled binaries Bleeping Computer reported that Serde, a popular Rust serialization framework, had decided to ship its serde_derive macro as a precompiled binary. As Ax Sharma writes:
The move has generated a fair amount of push back among developers who worry about its future legal and technical implications, along with a potential for supply chain attacks, should the maintainer account publishing these binaries be compromised.
After intensive discussions, use of the precompiled binary was phased out.

Reproducible builds, the first ten years On August 4th, Holger Levsen gave a talk at BornHack 2023 on the Danish island of Funen titled Reproducible Builds, the first ten years which promised to contain:
[ ] an overview about reproducible builds, the past, the presence and the future. How it started with a small [meeting] at DebConf13 (and before), how it grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an executive order of the president of the United States. (HTML slides)
Holger repeated the talk later in the month at Chaos Communication Camp 2023 in Zehdenick, Germany: A video of the talk is available online, as are the HTML slides.

Reproducible Builds Summit Just another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. 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. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out, which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so do reach out to the organizing team if you are able to help. (Also of note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit, and their schedule has just been published.)

Vagrant Cascadian on the Sustain podcast Vagrant Cascadian was interviewed on the SustainOSS podcast on reproducible builds:
Vagrant walks us through his role in the project where the aim is to ensure identical results in software builds across various machines and times, enhancing software security and creating a seamless developer experience. Discover how this mission, supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy and a broad community, is changing the face of Linux distros, Arch Linux, openSUSE, and F-Droid. They also explore the challenges of managing random elements in software, and Vagrant s vision to make reproducible builds a standard best practice that will ideally become automatic for users. Vagrant shares his work in progress and their commitment to the last mile problem.
The episode is available to listen (or download) from the Sustain podcast website. As it happens, the episode was recorded at FOSSY 2023, and the video of Vagrant s talk from this conference (Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust is now available on Archive.org: It was also announced that Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the Open Source Firmware Conference in October on the topic of Reproducible Builds All The Way Down.

On our mailing list Carles Pina i Estany wrote to our mailing list during August with an interesting question concerning the practical steps to reproduce the hello-traditional package from Debian. The entire thread can be viewed from the archive page, as can Vagrant Cascadian s reply.

Website updates Rahul Bajaj updated our website to add a series of environment variations related to reproducible builds [ ], Russ Cox added the Go programming language to our projects page [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian fixed a number of broken links and typos around the website [ ][ ][ ].

Software development In diffoscope development this month, versions 247, 248 and 249 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also added documentation for the new specialize_as method and expanding the documentation of the existing specialize as well [ ]. In addition, Fay Stegerman added specialize_as and used it to optimise .smali comparisons when decompiling Android .apk files [ ], Felix Yan and Mattia Rizzolo corrected some typos in code comments [ , ], Greg Chabala merged the RUN commands into single layer in the package s Dockerfile [ ] thus greatly reducing the final image size. Lastly, Roland Clobus updated tool descriptions to mark that the xb-tool has moved package within Debian [ ].
reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian updated the packaging to be compatible with Tox version 4. This was originally filed as Debian bug #1042918 and Holger Levsen uploaded this to change to Debian unstable as version 0.7.26 [ ].

Distribution work In Debian, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were added, including Chris Lamb adding a new timestamp_in_documentation_using_sphinx_zzzeeksphinx_theme toolchain issue.
In August, F-Droid added 25 new reproducible apps and saw 2 existing apps switch to reproducible builds, making 191 apps in total that are published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.

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:

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 August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Disable Debian live image creation jobs until an OpenQA credential problem has been fixed. [ ]
    • Run our maintenance scripts every 3 hours instead of every 2. [ ]
    • Export data for unstable to the reproducible-tracker.json data file. [ ]
    • Stop varying the build path, we want reproducible builds. [ ]
    • Temporarily stop updating the pbuilder.tgz for Debian unstable due to #1050784. [ ][ ]
    • Correctly document that we are not variying usrmerge. [ ][ ]
    • Mark two armhf nodes (wbq0 and jtx1a) as down; investigation is needed. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Force reconfiguration of all Jenkins jobs, due to the recent rise of zombie processes. [ ]
    • In the node health checks, also try to restart failed ntpsec, postfix and vnstat services. [ ][ ][ ]
  • System health checks:
    • Detect Debian live build failures due to missing credentials. [ ][ ]
    • Ignore specific types of known zombie processes. [ ][ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the scripts to use a predictable build path that is consistent with the one used on buildd.debian.org. [ ][ ]
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:

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 250 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 250. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix compatibility with file 5.45. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#351)
[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Add external tool references for GNU Guix (for html2text and ttx).
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

1 September 2023

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 249 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 249. This version includes the following changes: 
[ FC Stegerman ]
* Add specialize_as() method, and use it to speed up .smali comparison in
  APKs. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!108)
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add documentation for the new specialize_as, and expand the documentation
  of  specialize  too. (Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!108)
* Update copyright years.
[ Felix Yan ]
* Correct typos in diffoscope/presenters/utils.py.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

26 August 2023

Christoph Berg: PostgreSQL Popularity Contest

Back in 2015, when PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha 1 was released, I had posted the PostgreSQL data from Debian's popularity contest. 8 years and 8 PostgreSQL releases later, the graph now looks like this: Currently, the most popular PostgreSQL on Debian systems is still PostgreSQL 13 (shipped in Bullseye), followed by PostgreSQL 11 (Buster). At the time of writing, PostgreSQL 9.6 (Stretch) and PostgreSQL 15 (Bookworm) share the third place, with 15 rising quickly.

15 August 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In July, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 24.75h (out of 18.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period).
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 14.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 23.25h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 10.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 16.0h (out of 9.75h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 19.25h (out of 14.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 25.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 21.25h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.5h (out of 0h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 35 DLAs. LTS contributor Lee Garrett, has continued his hard work to prepare a testing framework for Samba, that can now provision bootable VMs with little effort, both for Debian and for Windows. This work included the introduction of a new package to Debian, rhsrvany, which allows turning any Windows program or script into a Windows service. As the Samba testing framework matures it will be possible to perform functional tests which cannot be performed with other available test mechanisms and aspects of this framework will be generalizable to other package ecosystems beyond Samba. July included a notable security update of bind9 by LTS contributor Chris Lamb. This update addressed a potential denial of service attack in this critical network infrastructure component.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

4 August 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2023

Welcome to the July 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit the Contribute page on our website.
Marcel Fourn et al. presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco, CA on The Importance and Challenges of Reproducible Builds for Software Supply Chain Security. As summarised in last month s report, the abstract of their paper begins:
The 2020 Solarwinds attack was a tipping point that caused a heightened awareness about the security of the software supply chain and in particular the large amount of trust placed in build systems. Reproducible Builds (R-Bs) provide a strong foundation to build defenses for arbitrary attacks against build systems by ensuring that given the same source code, build environment, and build instructions, bitwise-identical artifacts are created. (PDF)
Chris Lamb published an interview with Simon Butler, associate senior lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Sk vde, on the business adoption of Reproducible Builds. (This is actually the seventh instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support our project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project, and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as recent ones about ARDC, the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), Bootstrappable Builds, the F-Droid project and David A. Wheeler.) Vagrant Cascadian presented Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust at FOSSY 2023.
Rahul Bajaj has been working with Roland Clobus on merging an overview of environment variations to our website:
I have identified 16 root causes for unreproducible builds in my empirical study, which I have linked to the corresponding documentation. The initial MR right now contains information about 10 root causes. For each root cause, I have provided a definition, a notable instance, and a workaround. However, I have only found workarounds for 5 out of the 10 root causes listed in this merge request. In the upcoming commits, I plan to add an additional 6 root causes. I kindly request you review the text for any necessary refinements, modifications, or corrections. Additionally, I would appreciate the help with documentation for the solutions/workarounds for the remaining root causes: Archive Metadata, Build ID, File System Ordering, File Permissions, and Snippet Encoding. Your input on the identified root causes for unreproducible builds would be greatly appreciated. [ ]
Just a reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. 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. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location.
There was more progress towards making the Go programming language ecosystem reproducible this month, including: In addition, kpcyrd posted to our mailing list to report that:
while packaging govulncheck for Arch Linux I noticed a checksum mismatch for a tar file I downloaded from go.googlesource.com. I used diffoscope to compare the .tar file I downloaded with the .tar file the build server downloaded, and noticed the timestamps are different.
In Debian, 20 reviews of Debian packages were added, 25 were updated and 25 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated, including marking ffile_prefix_map_passed_to_clang being fixed since Debian bullseye [ ] and adding a Debian bug tracker reference for the nondeterminism_added_by_pyqt5_pyrcc5 issue [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted another detailed update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that live images are looking good, and the number of (passing) automated tests is growing .
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.
F-Droid added 20 new reproducible apps in July, making 165 apps in total that are published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ]
The Sphinx documentation tool recently accepted a change to improve deterministic reproducibility of documentation. It s internal util.inspect.object_description attempts to sort collections, but this can fail. The change handles the failure case by using string-based object descriptions as a fallback deterministic sort ordering, as well as adding recursive object-description calls for list and tuple datatypes. As a result, documentation generated by Sphinx will be more likely to be automatically reproducible. Lastly in news, kpcyrd posted to our mailing list announcing a new repro-env tool:
My initial interest in reproducible builds was how do I distribute pre-compiled binaries on GitHub without people raising security concerns about them . I ve cycled back to this original problem about 5 years later and built a tool that is meant to address this. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
In diffoscope development this month, versions 244, 245 and 246 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also made the following changes:
  • Don t include the file size in image metadata. It is, at best, distracting, and it is already in the directory metadata. [ ]
  • Add compatibility with libarchive-5. [ ]
  • Mark that the test_dex::test_javap_14_differences test requires the procyon tool. [ ]
  • Initial work on DOS/MBR extraction. [ ]
  • Move to using assert_diff in the .ico and .jpeg tests. [ ]
  • Temporarily mark some Android-related as XFAIL due to Debian bugs #1040941 & #1040916. [ ]
  • Fix the test skipped reason generation in the case of a version outside of the required range. [ ]
  • Update copyright years. [ ][ ]
  • Fix try.diffoscope.org. [ ]
In addition, Gianfranco Costamagna added support for LLVM version 16. [ ]

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 July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • General changes:
    • Upgrade Jenkins host to Debian bookworm now that Debian 12.1 is out. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • djm: improve UX when rebooting a node fails. [ ]
    • djm: reduce wait time between rebooting nodes. [ ]
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Various refactoring of the Debian scheduler. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Make Debian live builds more robust with respect to salsa.debian.org returning HTTP 502 errors. [ ][ ]
    • Use the legacy SCP protocol instead of the SFTP protocol when transfering Debian live builds. [ ][ ]
    • Speed up a number of database queries thanks, Myon! [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Split create_meta_pkg_sets job into two (for Debian unstable and Debian testing) to half the job runtime to approximately 90 minutes. [ ][ ]
    • Split scheduler job into four separate jobs, one for each tested architecture. [ ][ ]
    • Treat more PostgreSQL errors as serious (for some jobs). [ ]
    • Re-enable automatic database documentation now that postgresql_autodoc is back in Debian bookworm. [ ]
    • Remove various hardcoding of Debian release names. [ ]
    • Drop some i386 special casing. [ ]
  • Other distributions:
    • Speed up Alpine SQL queries. [ ]
    • Adjust CSS layout for Arch Linux pages to match 3 and not 4 repos being tested. [ ]
    • Drop the community Arch Linux repo as it has now been merged into the extra repo. [ ]
    • Speed up a number of Arch-related database queries. [ ]
    • Try harder to properly cleanup after building OpenWrt packages. [ ]
    • Drop all kfreebsd-related tests now that it s officially dead. [ ]
  • System health:
    • Always ignore some well-known harmless orphan processes. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Detect another case of job failure due to Jenkins shutdown. [ ]
    • Show all non co-installable package sets on the status page. [ ]
    • Warn that some specific reboot nodes are currently false-positives. [ ]
  • Node health checks:
    • Run system and node health checks for Jenkins less frequently. [ ]
    • Try to restart any failed dpkg-db-backup [ ] and munin-node services [ ].
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the paths in our automated to tests to use the same paths used by the official Debian build servers. [ ]
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:

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 247 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 247. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix compataibility with file(1) version 5.45.
* Use assert_diff in test_uimage and test_cpio.
[ Roland Clobus ]
* xb-tool has moved in Debian bookworm.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

1 August 2023

Jonathan Dowland: Interzone's new home

IZ #294, the latest issue IZ #294, the latest issue
The long running British1 SF Magazine Interzone has a new home and new editor, Gareth Jelley, starting with issue 294. It's also got a swanky new format ("JB6"): a perfect-bound, paperback novel size, perfect for fitting into an oversize coat or jeans pocket for reading on the train. I started reading Interzone in around 2003, having picked up an issue (#176) from Feb 2002 that was languishing on the shelves in Forbidden Planet. Once I discovered it I wondered why it had taken me so long. That issue introduced me to Greg Egan. I bought a number of back issues on eBay, to grab issues with stories by people including Terry Pratchett, Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and others.
IZ #194: The first by TTA press IZ #194: The first by TTA press
A short while later in early 2004, after 22 years, Interzone's owner and editorship changed from David Pringle to Andy Cox and TTA Press. I can remember the initial transition was very jarring: the cover emphasised expanding into coverage of Manga, Graphic Novels and Video Games (which ultimately didn't happen) but after a short period of experimentation it quickly settled down into a similarly fantastic read. I particularly liked the move to a smaller, perfect-bound form-factor in 2012. I had to double-check this but I'd been reading IZ throughout the TTA era and it lasted 18 years! Throughout that time I have discovered countless fantastic authors that I would otherwise never have experienced. Some (but by no means all) are Dominic Green, Daniel Kaysen, Chris Beckett, C cile Cristofari, Aliya Whiteley, Tim Major, Fran oise Harvey, Will McIntosh. Cox has now retired (after 100 issues and a tenure almost as long as Pringle) and handed the reins to Gareth Jelley/MYY Press, who have published their first issue, #294. Jelley is clearly putting a huge amount of effort into revitalizing the magazine. There's a new homepage at interzone.press but also companion internet presences: a plethora of digital content at interzone.digital, Interzone Socials (a novel idea), a Discord server, a podcast, and no doubt more. Having said that, the economics of small magazines have been perilous for a long time, and that hasn't changed, so I think the future of IZ (in physical format at least) is in peril. If you enjoy short fiction, fresh ideas, SF/F/Fantastika; why not try a subscription to Interzone, whilst you still can!
  1. Interzone has always been "British", in some sense, but never exclusively so. I recall fondly a long-term project under Pringle to publish a lot of Serbian writer Zoran ivkovi , for example, and the very first story I read was by Australian Greg Egan. Under Jelley, the magazine is being printed in Poland and priced in Euros. I expect it to continue to attract and publish writers from all over the place.

Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: Simon Butler on business adoption of Reproducible Builds

The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do. This is the seventh instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project, and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as recent ones about ARDC, the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), Bootstrappable Builds, the F-Droid project and David A. Wheeler. Today, however, we will be talking with Simon Butler, an associate senior lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Sk vde, where he undertakes research in software engineering that focuses on IoT and open source software, and contributes to the teaching of computer science to undergraduates.

Chris: For those who have not heard of it before, can you tell us more about the School of Informatics at Sk vde University? Simon: Certainly, but I may be a little long-winded. Sk vde is a city in the area between the two large lakes in southern Sweden. The city is a busy place. Sk vde is home to the regional hospital, some of Volvo s manufacturing facilities, two regiments of the Swedish defence force, a lot of businesses in the Swedish computer games industry, other tech companies and more. The University of Sk vde is relatively small. Sweden s large land area and low population density mean that regional centres such as Sk vde are important and local universities support businesses by training new staff and supporting innovation. The School of Informatics has two divisions. One focuses on teaching and researching computer games. The other division encompasses a wider range of teaching and research, including computer science, web development, computer security, network administration, data science and so on.
Chris: You recently had a open-access paper published in Software Quality Journal. Could you tell us a little bit more about it and perhaps briefly summarise its key findings? Simon: The paper is one output of a collaborative research project with six Swedish businesses that use open source software. There are two parts to the paper. The first consists of an analysis of what the group of businesses in the project know about Reproducible Builds (R-Bs), their experiences with R-Bs and their perception of the value of R-Bs to the businesses. The second part is an interview study with business practitioners and others with experience and expertise in R-Bs. We set out to try to understand the extent to which software-intensive businesses were aware of R-Bs, the technical and business reasons they were or were not using R-Bs and to document the business and technical use cases for R-Bs. The key findings were that businesses are aware of R-Bs, and some are using R-Bs as part of their day-to-day development process. Some of the uses for R-Bs we found were not previously documented. We also found that businesses understood the value R-Bs have as part of engineering and software quality processes. They are also aware of the costs of implementing R-Bs and that R-Bs are an intangible value proposition - in other words, businesses can add value through process improvement by using R-Bs. But, that, currently at least, R-Bs are not a selling point for software or products.
Chris: You performed a large number of interviews in order to prepare your paper. What was the most surprising response to you? Simon: Most surprising is a good question. Everybody I spoke to brought something new to my understanding of R-Bs, and many responses surprised me. The interviewees that surprised me most were I01 and I02 (interviews were anonymised and interviewees were assigned numeric identities). I02 described the sceptical perspective that there is a viable, pragmatic alternative to R-Bs - verifiable builds - which I was aware of before undertaking the research. The company had developed a sufficiently robust system for their needs and worked well. With a large archive of software used in production, they couldn t justify the cost of retrofitting a different solution that might only offer small advantages over the existing system. Doesn t really sound too surprising, but the interview was one of the first I did on this topic, and I was very focused on the value of, and need for, trust in a system that motivated the R-B. The solution used by the company requires trust, but they seem to have established sufficient trust for their needs by securing their build systems to the extent that they are more or less tamper-proof. The other big surprise for me was I01 s use of R-Bs to support the verification of system configuration in a system with multiple embedded components at boot time. It s such an obvious application of R-Bs, and exactly the kind of response I hoped to get from interviewees. However, it is another instance of a solution where trust is only one factor. In the first instance, the developer is using R-Bs to establish trust in the toolchain. There is also the second application that the developer can use a set of R-Bs to establish that deployed system consists of compatible components. While this might not sound too significant, there appear to be some important potential applications. One that came to mind immediately is a problem with firmware updates on nodes in IoT systems where the node needs to update quickly with limited downtime and without failure. The node also needs to be able to roll back any update proposed by a server if there are conflicts with the current configuration or if any tests on the node fail. Perhaps the chances of failure could be reduced, if a node can instead negotiate with a server to determine a safe path to migrate from its current configuration to a working configuration with the upgraded components the central system requires? Another potential application appears to be in the configuration management of AI systems, where decisions need to be explainable. A means of specifying validated configurations of training data, models and deployed systems might, perhaps, be leveraged to prevent invalid or broken configurations from being deployed in production.
Chris: One of your findings was that reproducible builds were perceived to be good engineering practice . To what extent do you believe cultural forces affect the adoption or rejection of a given technology or practice? Simon: To a large extent. People s decisions are informed by cultural norms, and business decisions are made by people acting collectively. Of course, decision-making, including assessments of risk and usefulness, is mediated by individual positions on the continuum from conformity to non-conformity, as well as individual and in-group norms. Whether a business will consider a given technology for adoption will depend on cultural forces. The decision to adopt may well be made on the grounds of cost and benefits.
Chris: Another conclusion implied by your research is that businesses are often dealing with software deployment lifespans (eg. 20+ years) that differ from widely from those of the typical hobbyist programmer. To what degree do you think this temporal mismatch is a problem for both groups? Simon: This is a fascinating question. Long-term software maintenance is a requirement in some industries because of the working lifespans of the products and legal requirements to maintain the products for a fixed period. For some other industries, it is less of a problem. Consequently, I would tend to divide developers into those who have been exposed to long-term maintenance problems and those who have not. Although, more professional than hobbyist developers will have been exposed to the problem. Nonetheless, there are areas, such as music software, where there are also long-term maintenance challenges for data formats and software.
Chris: Based on your research, what would you say are the biggest blockers for the adoption of reproducible builds within business ? And, based on this, would you have any advice or recommendations for the broader reproducible builds ecosystem? Simon: From the research, the main blocker appears to be cost. Not an absolute cost, but there is an overhead to introducing R-Bs. Businesses (and thus business managers) need to understand the business case for R-Bs. Making decision-makers in businesses aware of R-Bs and that they are valuable will take time. Advocacy at multiple levels appears to be the way forward and this is being done. I would recommend being persistent while being patient and to keep talking about reproducible builds. The work done in Linux distributions raises awareness of R-Bs amongst developers. Guix, NixOS and Software Heritage are all providing practical solutions and getting attention - I ve been seeing progressively more mentions of all three during the last couple of years. Increased awareness amongst developers should lead to more interest within companies. There is also research money being assigned to supply chain security and R-B s. The CHAINS project at KTH in Stockholm is one example of a strategic research project. There may be others that I m not aware of. The policy-level advocacy is slowly getting results in some countries, and where CISA leads, others may follow.
Chris: Was there a particular reason you alighted on the question of the adoption of reproducible builds in business? Do you think there s any truth behind the shopworn stereotype of hacker types neglecting the resources that business might be able to offer? Simon: Much of the motivation for the research came from the contrast between the visibility of R-Bs in open source projects and the relative invisibility of R-Bs in industry. Where companies are known to be using R-Bs (e.g. Google, etc.) there is no fuss, no hype. They were not selling R-Bs as a solution; instead the documentation is very matter-of-fact that R-Bs are part of a customer-facing process in their cloud solutions. An obvious question for me was that if some people use R-B s in software development, why doesn t everybody? There are limits to the tooling for some programming languages that mean R-Bs are difficult or impossible. But where creating an R-B is practical, why are they not used more widely? So, to your second question. There is another factor, which seems to be more about a lack of communication rather than neglecting opportunities. Businesses may not always be willing to discuss their development processes and innovations. Though I do think the increasing number of conferences (big and small) for software practitioners is helping to facilitate more communication and greater exchange of ideas.
Chris: Has your personal view of reproducible builds changed since before you embarked on writing this paper? Simon: Absolutely! In the early stages of the research, I was interested in questions of trust and how R-Bs were applied to resolve build and supply chain security problems. As the research developed, however, I started to see there were benefits to the use of R-Bs that were less obvious and that, in some cases, an R-B can have more than a single application.
Chris: Finally, do you have any plans to do future research touching on reproducible builds? Simon: Yes, definitely. There are a set of problems that interest me. One already mentioned is the use of reproducible builds with AI systems. Interpretable or explainable AI (XAI) is a necessity, and I think that R-Bs can be used to support traceability in the configuration and testing of both deployed systems and systems used during model training and evaluation. I would also like to return to a problem discussed briefly in the article, which is to develop a deeper understanding of the elements involved in the application of R-Bs that can be used to support reasoning about existing and potential applications of R-Bs. For example, R-Bs can be used to establish trust for different groups of individuals at different times, say, between remote developers prior to the release of software and by users after release. One question is whether when an R-B is used might be a significant factor. Another group of questions concerns the ways in which trust (of some sort) propagates among users of an R-B. There is an example in the paper of a company that rebuilds Debian reproducibly for security reasons and is then able to collaborate on software projects where software is built reproducibly with other companies that use public distributions of Debian.
Chris: Many thanks for this interview, Simon. If someone wanted to get in touch or learn more about you and your colleagues at the School of Informatics, where might they go? Thank you for the opportunity. It has been a pleasure to reflect a little more widely on the research! Personally, you can find out about my work on my official homepage and on my personal site. The software systems research group (SSRG) has a website, and the University of Sk vde s English language pages are also available. Chris: Many thanks for this interview, Simon!

For more information about the Reproducible Builds project, please see our website at reproducible-builds.org. If you are interested in ensuring the ongoing security of the software that underpins our civilisation and wish to sponsor the Reproducible Builds project, please reach out to the project by emailing contact@reproducible-builds.org.

21 July 2023

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 245 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 245. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't include file size in image metadata; it is, at best, distracting and
  it is already in the directory metadata.
* Move to using assert_diff in ICO and JPEG tests.
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

17 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: WordPress Cookies, Debdelta, RISC, Manipur, Libraries in Kerala.

WordPress Cookies, Debdelta One of the most irritating things about WordPress is whenever I start a firefox session, WordPress aks for cookie selection. I make my choices but it s not persistent. The next session the same thing happens again. It does keep my identity but for some unknown reason doesn t respect the Cookie selection. I usually use Firefox ESR (102.13.0esr-1) on Testing. Also, for more than a week I have found debdelta not working as it should. To give a brief history, the idea of debdelta is to save bandwidth, whether it 100 kbps or 1 mbit or whatever, the moment you give debdelta-upgrade it will try to see if there is a delta of the debs that you want to upgrade. The sequence is as follows or at least that is what I do
  1. $sudo apt update (updates the index files of apt and tells you how many packages are upgradable). IIRC, every 4-5 hours there is an index runs that basically catches any new debian packages. You can see the index generated dynamically each time you run the above command in /var/lib/apt/lists
2. $ sudo debdelta-upgrade Now the debdelta algorithim goes to work. Debdelta has its own mirror. I think sometime after the indexes are updated, debdelta does it own run, probably an hour or two later. The algorithim sees how big the diff between the two packages and generates a delta. If the generated delta (diff.) between the old and the new is less than 70% then the generated delta is kept or otherwise thrown. The delta is kept in debdelta mirror. You can from 1 day history how big it is. And AFAIK, it is across all the hardware and platforms that Debian supports. My issue has been simply that debdelta just doesn t work and even after debdelta-upgrade I am forced to get all the files from the server. Have shared more details here. 3. The last step is $ sudo aptitude upgrade or $ sudo aptitude install and give package names if you know some packages are broken or non-resolvable or have some bugs.

RISC I had shared about RISC chips couple of weeks back. One of the things that I had forgotten to share that Android is also supporting RISC-V few months back. How I forgot that crucial bit of info. is beyond me. There are number of RISC-V coming out in the next few months to early 2024. One of the more interesting boards that came up in 2021/2022 was HiFive Unmatched. The problem is that the board although interesting on specs is out of reach of most Indians. I am sure most people would be aware of the chicken and egg problem and that is where it is. Pricing will be key component. If they get the pricing right and are able to produce in good numbers, we might see more of these boards soon. At least with Android that issue gets somewhat resolved. There is possibility that we may see more Android set-top boxes and whatnot paired with RISC paving more money for RISC development and a sort of virtuous cycle. While I m in two minds, I decide not to share what chips are coming unless and until we know what the pricing is, otherwise they just become part of a hype cycle. But it s definitely something to watch out for. One of the more interesting articles that I read last week also tells how Linux has crossed 3% desktop space and his views on the same. I do very much agree with his last paragraph but at the same time biased as am an old time desktop user. I just don t find myself happy on small factor keyboards. I will leave the rest for some other time depending how things happen.

Manipur Before I start sharing about Manipur, I should thank Praveen A. few years back, Praveen wanted to see the 7 sisters and in fact had even proposed to partially sponsor me so that we could together visit the 7 states of North-East. For reasons I don t remember, I just wasn t able to go. Probably some work and responsibilities at home. For almost 2.5 months now, Manipur, one of the States in the 7 states has been burning. There have been talks and sharing of genocidial murder of Christians in Manipur. This is not just me or some random person talking about, even BJP (the ruling party in the Center), their functionaries both in Manipur and its neighboring state Mizoram have been sharing. Mizoram s State BJP President in fact resigned just few days back saying it s state sponsored activity. Couple of days back, European Parliament held a session about Manipur and even passed a resolution. The BJP tried to hit back saying Colonial Mindset but when asked if it s the same when India invited European Parliamentarians to visit Kashmir in 2019, the silence is deafening. The Wire has interviewed all the prominent leaders and sort of players in Manipur politics but apart from calling Kukis foreigners they have no proof. In one of the interviews one of the Meitei leaders calls Kuki s foreigners but doesn t have any Government data to support his belief. The census of India was last held in 2011. People from the civil society have time and again asked the Government to do the census but GOI has been giving one excuse after another. They in fact, wanted to do a caste census but that too they themselves took on back foot probably as they believe that both census may give results not to their liking. In fact, this Government is also known as No Data Government as almost in everything, it denies data. I am not going to go to that otherwise would not be able to complete blog post till couple of days. I will just share this bit of info. that this Govt. hasn t given Household Consumption Survey data for last four years. Going back to the topic though, neither the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Defence Minister nobody has been able to utter the word Manipur till date. I have no idea when they will wake up. People from all ethnicities have tried to make representations to GOI but no one has been able to meet them, neither the Kukis, nor the Nagas, nor the Meiteis even though it is a sensitive border area.

Libraries in Kerala I wanted to end on a somewhat positive note. So just a few days back, the Miinistry of Culture shared the number of Libraries per state. As can be seen from the infographic, Kerala is a giant in that. If I do find a table, would share that as well, so those who can t see can hear the data. Till later.

15 July 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 40 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included mariadb-10.3, openssl, and golang-go.crypto. The mariadb-10.3 package was synchronized with the latest upstream maintenance release, version 10.3.39. The openssl package was patched to correct several flaws with certificate validation and with object identifier parsing. Finally, the golang-go.crypto package was updated to address several vulnerabilities, and several associated Go packages were rebuilt in order to properly incorporate the update. LTS contributor Sylvain has been hard at work with some behind-the-scenes improvements to internal tooling and documentation. His efforts are helping to improve the efficiency of all LTS contributors and also helping to improve the quality of their work, making our LTS updates more timely and of higher quality. LTS contributor Lee Garrett began working on a testing framework specifically for Samba. Given the critical role which Samba plays in many deployments, the tremendous impact which regressions can have in those cases, and the unique testing requirements of Samba, this work will certainly result in increased confidence around our Samba updates for LTS. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun preparatory work for the upcoming Firefox ESR version 115 release. Firefox ESR (and the related Thunderbird ESR) requires special work to maintain up to date in LTS. Mozilla do not release individual patches for CVEs, and our policy is to incorporate new ESR releases from Mozilla into LTS. Most updates are minor updates, but once a year Mozilla will release a major update as they move to a new major version for ESR. The update to a new major ESR version entails many related updates to toolchain and other packages. The preparations that Emilio has begun will ensure that once the 115 ESR release is made, updated packages will be available in LTS with minimal delay. Another highlight of behind-the-scenes work is our Front Desk personnel. While we often focus on the work which results in published package updates, much work is also involved in reviewing new vulnerabilities and triaging them (i.e., determining if they affect one or more packages in LTS and then determining the severity of those which are applicable). These intrepid contributors (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Markus Koschany, Ola Lundqvist, Sylvain Beucler, and Thorsten Alteholz for the month of June) reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities and made decisions about how those vulnerabilities should be dealt with.

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14 July 2023

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 244 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 244. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Address compatibility with python-libarchive-c version 5.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#344)
* Testsuite changes:
  - Mark that test_dex::test_javap_14_differences requires procyon.
  - Fix "test skipped" textual reason generation in the case of a required
    version being outside of the required range.
  - Temporarily mark some Android-related as XFAIL due to Debian bugs
    #1040941 and #1040916.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

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