Search Results: "iko"

18 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 50 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 3rd and April 9th 2016: Media coverage Emily Ratliff wrote an article for SecurityWeek called Establishing Correspondence Between an Application and its Source Code - How Combining Two Completely Separate Open Source Projects Can Make Us All More Secure. Tails have started work on a design for freezable APT repositories to make it easier and practical to perform reproductions of an entire distribution at a given point in time, which will be needed to create reproducible installation- or live-media. Toolchain fixes Alexis Bienven e submitted patches adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in several tools: transfig, imagemagick, rdtool, and asciidoctor. boyska submitted one for python-reportlab. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330 brailleutils cglib3 gnugo libcobra-java libgnumail-java libjchart2d-java libjcommon-java libjfreechart-java libjide-oss-java liblaf-widget-java liblastfm-java liboptions-java octave-control octave-mpi octave-nan octave-parallel octave-stk octave-struct octave-tsa oar The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Several uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Other upstream fixes Alexander Batischev made a commit to make newsbeuter reproducible. tests.reproducible-builds.org Package reviews 93 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 21 updated in the previous week. 12 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. Misc. This week's edition was written by Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and Ximin Luo. With the departure of Lunar as a full-time contributor, Reproducible Builds Weekly News (this thing you're reading) has moved from his personal Debian blog on Debian People to the Reproducible Builds team web site on Debian Alioth. You may want to update your RSS or Atom feeds. Very many thanks to Lunar for writing and publishing this weekly news for so long, well & continously!

Dariusz Dwornikowski: XWiki and slashes in URI

XWiki is a great open source Atlassian Confluence replacement (some argue it is better, I leave it to your assessment). We use XWiki a lot at Tenesys to document internal projects, and create documentation of clients' platforms. We run XWiki in Tomcat application server, behind nginx proxy. We use great XWiki's plugin, called FAQ, which can be used to create, well FAQs. The problem we had was that sometimes people (me especially) created FAQ entries with a / in the name, which resulted in XWiki creating a slug with / character, which is used to delimit page hierarchy in XWIki. Basically, you wanted to write How to install Debian/Ubuntu package and you ended up with two pages: How to install Debian and a subpage Ubuntu package. You can't easily delete the 'slashed' FAQ page because by default the last one is deleted only. The solution to this problems is twofold. First of all, you need to tell Tomcat to allow passing encoded slash (%2F) oto XWiki. Add to -Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH=true to CATALINA_OPTS. You can either do it via catalina.sh or catalina.opts. Second of all, you need to make sure that your nginx proxy directive is bare, i.e. does not contain URI part, see relevant stack question here. Basically you want your proxy_pass to look like that: 
location /  
  proxy_pass http://backend;
... not like that. 
location /  
  proxy_pass http://backend/xwiki;
I spent quite a lot of time before I discovered that nginx caveat. Hope it helps somebody too.

14 March 2016

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2016)

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 March 2016

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1 March 2016

Enrico Zini: Static site generators

I decided to rethink the state of my personal site, and try out some of the new static site generators that are available now. To do that, I jotted down a series of things that I want in a static site generator, then wrote a tool to convert my ikiwiki site to other formats, and set out to evaluate things. As a benchmark I did a full rebuild of my site, which currently contains 1164 static files and 458 markdown pages. My requirements Free layout for my site My / is mostly a high-level index to the site contents. Blog posts are at /blog. My talk archive is organised like a separate blog at /talks. I want the freedom to create other sections of the site, each with its own rss feed, located wherever I want in the site hierarchy. Assets next to posts I occasionally blog just a photo with a little comment, and I would like the .md page with the comment to live next to the image in the file system. I did not even know that I had this as a requirement until I found static site generators that mandated a completely different directory structure for markdown contents and for static assets. Multiple RSS/Atom feeds I want at least one RSS/Atom feed per tag, because I use tags for marking which articles go to http://planet.debian.org. I also want RSS/Atom feeds for specific parts of the site, like the blog and talks. Arbitrary contents in /index.html I want total control over the contents of the main home page of the site. Quick preview while editing contents I do not like to wait several seconds for the site to be rebuilt at every review iteration of the pages I write. This makes me feel like the task of editing is harder than it should, and makes me lose motivation to post. Reasonable time for a full site rebuild I want to be able to run a full rebuild of the site in a reasonable time. I could define "reasonable" in this case as how long I can stare at the screen without getting bored, starting to do something else, and forgetting what it was that I was doing with the site. It is ok if a rebuild takes something like 10 or 30 seconds. It is not ok if it takes minutes. Code and dependency ecosystems that I can work with I can deal with Python and Go. I cannot deal with Ruby or JavaScript. I forgot all about Perl. Also, if it isn't in Debian it does not exist. Decent themes out of the box One of my hopes in switching to a more mainstream generator is to pick and choose themes and easily give my site a more modern look. Hugo Hugo is written in Go and is in Debian testing. Full rebuild time for my site is acceptable, and it can even parallelize: 
  $ time hugo
  real      0m5.285s
  user      0m9.556s
  sys       0m1.052s
Free layout for my site was hard to get. I could replace /index.html by editing the template page for it, but then I did not find out how to create another similar index in an arbitrary place. Also, archetypes are applied only on the first path component of new posts, but I would like them instead to be matched on the last path component first, and failing that traveling up to the path until the top. This should be easy to fix by reorganizing the content a bit around here For example, a path for a new blog post of mine could be blog/2016/debian/ and I would like it to match the debian archetype first, and failing that the blog archetype. Assets next to posts almost work. Hugo automatically generates one feed per taxonomy element, and one feed per section. This would be currently sufficient for me, although I don't like the idea that sections map 1 to 1 to toplevel directories in the site structure. Hugo has a server that watches the file system and rerenders pages as they are modified, so the quick preview while editing works fine. About themes, it took me several tries to find a theme that would render navigation elements for both sections and tags, and most themes would render by pages with white components all around, and expect me to somehow dig in and tweak them. That frustrated me, because for quite a while I could not tell if I had misconfigured Hugo's taxonomies or if the theme was just somehow incomplete. Nikola Nikola is written in Python and is in Debian testing. Full rebuild time for my site is almost two orders of magnitude more than Hugo, and I am miffed to find the phrases "Nikola is fast." or "Fast building process" in its front page and package description: 
  $ time nikola build
  real      3m31.667s
  user      3m4.016s
  sys       0m24.684s
Free layout could be achieved fiddling with the site configuration to tell it where to read sources. Assets next to post work after tweaking the configuration, but they require to write inconsistent links in the markdown source: https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/issues/2266 I have a hard time accepting that that, because I want to author content with consistent semantic interlinking, because I want to be able 10 years from now to parse it and convert it to something else if a new technology comes out. Nikola generates one RSS/Atom feed per tag just fine. I have not tried generating feeds for different sections of the site. Incremental generation inside its built in server works fine. Pelican Pelican is written in Python and is in Debian testing. Full rebuild time for my site is acceptable: 
  $ time pelican -d
  real      0m18.207s
  user      0m16.680s
  sys       0m1.448s
By default, pelican seems to put generate a single flat directory of html files regardless of the directory hierarchy of the sources. To have free layout, pelican needs some convincing in the configuration: 
  PATH_METADATA = r"(?P<relpath>.+)\.md"
  ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = " relpath /index.html"
but even if I do that, the urls that it generates still point to just slug /index.html and I have not trivially found a configuration option to fix that accordingly. I got quite uncomfortable at the idea of needing to configure content generation and linking to match, instead of having one automatically being in sync with the other. Having assets next to posts seems to be possible (also setting STATIC_PATHS = ["."]), but I do not recall making progress on this front. I did not manage to generate a feed for each tag out of the box, and probably there is some knob in the configuration for it. I gave up with Pelican as trying it out felt like a constant process of hacking the configuration from defaults that do not make any sense for me, withouth even knowing if a configuration exists that would do what I need Ikiwiki Ikiwiki is written in Perl and is in Debian. Although I am not anymore proficient with Perl, I was already using it, so it was worth considering. Full rebuild time feels a bit on the slow side but is still acceptable: 
  $ time ikiwiki --setup site.setup
  real      0m37.356s
  user      0m34.488s
  sys       0m1.536s
In terms of free site structure, all feeds for all or part of the site, ikiwiki just excels. I even considered writing a python web server that monitors the file system and calls ikiwiki --refresh when anything changes, and calling it a day. However, when I tried to re-theme my website around a simple bootstrap boilerplate, I found that to be hard, as a some of the HTML structure is hardcoded in Perl (and it's also my fault) and there is only so much that can be done by tweaking the (rather unreadable) templates. siterefactor During all these experiments I had built siterefactor to generate contents for all those static site engines, and it was going through all the contents quite fast: 
  $ time ./siterefactor src dst -t hugo
  real  0m1.222s
  user  0m0.904s
  sys   0m0.308s
So I wondered how slow it would become if, instead of making it write markdown, I made it write HTML via python markdown and Jinja2: 
  $ time ./siterefactor ~/zz/ikiwiki/pub/ ~/zz/ikiwiki/web -t web
  real  0m6.739s
  user  0m5.952s
  sys   0m0.416s
I then started wondering how slower it would become if I implemented postprocessing of all local URLs generated by Markdown to make sure they are kept consistent even if the path of a generated page is different than the path of its source. Not much slower, really. I then added taxonomies. And arbitrary Jinja2 templates in the input, able to generate page lists and RSS/Atom feeds. And theming. And realised that reading all the sources and cross-linking them took 0.2 seconds, and the rest was generation time. And that after cross-linking, each page can be generated independently from all the others. staticsite So my site is now generated with staticsite: 
  $ time ssite build
  real  0m6.833s
  user  0m5.804s
  sys   0m0.500s
It's comparable with Hugo, and on a single process.

14 February 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 42 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 7th and February 13th 2016:

Toolchain fixes
  • James McCoy uploaded devscripts/2.16.1 which makes dcmd supports .buildinfo files. Original patch by josch.
  • Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer uploaded qt4-x11/4:4.8.7+dfsg-6 which make files created by qch reproducible by using a fixed date instead of the current time. Original patch by Dhole.
Norbert Preining rejected the patch submitted by Reiner Herrmann to make the CreationDate not appear in comments of DVI / PS files produced by TeX. He also mentioned that some timestamps can be replaced by using the -output-comment option and that the next version of pdftex will have patches inspired by reproducible build to mitigate the effects (see SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patches) .

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: abntex, apt-dpkg-ref, arduino, c++-annotations, cfi, chaksem, clif, cppreference-doc, dejagnu, derivations, ecasound, fdutils, gnash, gnu-standards, gnuift, gsequencer, gss, gstreamer0.10, gstreamer1.0, harden-doc, haskell98-report, iproute2, java-policy, libbluray, libmodbus, lizardfs, mclibs, moon-buggy, nurpawiki, php-sasl, shishi, stealth, xmltex, xsom. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #813944 on cvm by Reiner Herrmann: remove gzip headers, fix permissions of some directories and the order of the md5sums.
  • #814019 on latexdiff by Reiner Herrmann: remove the current build date from documentation.
  • #814214 on rocksdb by Chris Lamb: add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

reproducible.debian.net A new armhf build node has been added (thanks to Vagrant Cascadian) and integrated into the Jenkins setup for 4 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger) All packages for Debian testing (Stretch) have been tested on armhf in just 42 days. It took 114 days to get the same point for unstable back when the armhf test infrastructure was much smaller. Package sets have been enabled for testing on armhf. (h01ger) Packages producing architecture-independent ( Arch:all ) binary packages together with architecture dependent packages targeted for specific architectures will now only be tested on matching architectures. (Steven Chamberlain, h01ger) As the Jenkins setup is now made of 252 different jobs, the overview has been split into 11 different smalller views. (h01ger)

Package reviews 222 reviews have been removed, 110 added and 50 updated in the previous week. 35 FTBFS reports were made by Chris Lamb, Danny Edel, and Niko Tyni.

Misc. The recordings of Ludovic Court s' talk at FOSDEM 16 about reproducible builds and GNU Guix is now available. One can also have a look at slides from Fabian Keil's talk about ElecrtroBSD and Baptiste Daroussin's talk about FreeBSD packages.

8 February 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 41 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week:

Toolchain fixes After remarks from Guillem Jover, Lunar updated his patch adding generation of .buildinfo files in dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dracut, ent, gdcm, guilt, lazarus, magit, matita, resource-agents, rurple-ng, shadow, shorewall-doc, udiskie. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
  • disque/1.0~rc1-5 by Chris Lamb, noticed by Reiner Herrmann.
  • dlm/4.0.4-2 by Ferenc W gner.
  • drbd-utils/8.9.6-1 by Apollon Oikonomopoulos.
  • java-common/0.54 by by Emmanuel Bourg.
  • libjibx1.2-java/1.2.6-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
  • libzstd/0.4.7-1 by Kevin Murray.
  • python-releases/1.0.0-1 by Jan Dittberner.
  • redis/2:3.0.7-2 by Chris Lamb, noticed by Reiner Herrmann.
  • tetex-brev/4.22.github.20140417-3 by Petter Reinholdtsen.
Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:
  • anarchism/14.0-4 by Holger Levsen.
  • hhvm/3.11.1+dfsg-1 by Faidon Liambotis.
  • netty/1:4.0.34-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #813309 on lapack by Reiner Herrmann: removes the test log and sorts the files packed into the static library locale-independently.
  • #813345 on elastix by akira: suggest to use the $datetime placeholder in Doxygen footer.
  • #813892 on dietlibc by Reiner Herrmann: remove gzip headers, sort md5sums file, and sort object files linked in static libraries.
  • #813912 on git by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from documentation generated with asciidoc, remove gzip headers, and sort md5sums and tclIndex files.

reproducible.debian.net For the first time, we've reached more than 20,000 packages with reproducible builds for sid on amd64 with our current test framework. Vagrant Cascadian has set up another test system for armhf. Enabling four more builder jobs to be added to Jenkins. (h01ger)

Package reviews 233 reviews have been removed, 111 added and 86 updated in the previous week. 36 new FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb and Alastair McKinstry. New issue: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_yat2m. The description for the blacklisted_on_jenkins issue has been improved. Some packages are also now tagged with blacklisted_on_jenkins_armhf_only.

Misc. Steven Chamberlain gave an update on the status of FreeBSD and variants after the BSD devroom at FOSDEM 16. He also discussed how jails can be used for easier and faster reproducibility tests. The video for h01ger's talk in the main track of FOSDEM 16 about the reproducible ecosystem is now available.

5 February 2016

Daniel Pocock: Giving up democracy to get it back

Do services like Facebook and Twitter really help worthwhile participation in democracy, or are they the most sinister and efficient mechanism ever invented to control people while giving the illusion that they empower us? Over the last few years, groups on the left and right of the political spectrum have spoken more and more loudly about the problems in the European Union. Some advocate breaking up the EU, while behind the scenes milking it for every handout they can get. Others seek to reform it from within. Yanis Varoufakis on motorbike Most recently, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced plans to found a movement (not a political party) that claims to "democratise" the EU by 2025. Ironically, one of his first steps has been to create a web site directing supporters to Facebook and Twitter. A groundbreaking effort to put citizens back in charge? Or further entangling activism in the false hope of platforms that are run for profit by their Silicon Valley overlords? A Greek tragedy indeed, in the classical sense. Varoufakis rails against authoritarian establishment figures who don't put the citizens' interests first. Ironically, big data and the cloud are a far bigger threat than Brussels. The privacy and independence of each citizen is fundamental to a healthy democracy. Companies like Facebook are obliged - by law and by contract - to service the needs of their shareholders and advertisers paying to study and influence the poor user. If "Facebook privacy" settings were actually credible, who would want to buy their shares any more? Facebook is more akin to an activism placebo: people sitting in their armchair clicking to "Like" whales or trees are having hardly any impact at all. Maintaining democracy requires a sufficient number of people to be actively involved, whether it is raising funds for worthwhile causes, scrutinizing the work of our public institutions or even writing blogs like this. Keeping them busy on Facebook and Twitter renders them impotent in the real world (but please feel free to alert your friends with a tweet) Big data is one of the areas that requires the greatest scrutiny. Many of the professionals working in the field are actually selling out their own friends and neighbours, their own families and even themselves. The general public and the policy makers who claim to represent us are oblivious or reckless about the consequences of this all-you-can-eat feeding frenzy on humanity. Pretending to be democratic is all part of the illusion. Facebook's recent announcement to deviate from their real-name policy is about as effective as using sunscreen to treat HIV. By subjecting themselves to the laws of Facebook, activists have simply given Facebook more status and power. Data means power. Those who are accumulating it from us, collecting billions of tiny details about our behavior, every hour of every day, are fortifying a position of great strength with which they can personalize messages to condition anybody, anywhere, to think the way they want us to. Does that sound like the route to democracy? I would encourage Mr Varoufakis to get up to speed with Free Software and come down to Zurich next week to hear Richard Stallman explain it the day before launching his DiEM25 project in Berlin. Will the DiEM25 movement invite participation from experts on big data and digital freedom and make these issues a core element of their promised manifesto? Is there any credible way they can achieve their goal of democracy by 2025 without addressing such issues head-on? Or put that the other way around: what will be left of democracy in 2025 if big data continues to run rampant? Will it be as distant as the gods of Greek mythology? Still not convinced? Read about Amazon secretly removing George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles while people were reading them, Apple filtering the availability of apps with a pro-Life bias and Facebook using algorithms to identify homosexual users.

30 January 2016

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.19.1 released (backup software)

I have just released version 1.19.1 of Obnam, the backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what's new in this version. Basically, it fixes a bug. NOTE: Obnam has an EXPERIMENTAL repository format under development, called green-albatross. It is NOT meant for real use. It is likely to change in incompatible ways without warning. Do not use it unless you're willing to lose your backup. Version 1.19.1, released 2016-01-30 Bug fix:

17 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 38 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 10th and January 16th:

Toolchain fixes Benjamin Drung uploaded mozilla-devscripts/0.43 which sorts the file list in preferences files. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Lunar submitted an updated patch series to make timestamps in packages created by dpkg deterministic. To ensure that the mtimes in data.tar are reproducible, with the patches, dpkg-deb uses the --clamp-mtime option added in tar/1.28-1 when available. An updated package has been uploaded to the experimental repository. This removed the need for a modified debhelper as all required changes for reproducibility have been merged or are now covered by dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: angband-doc, bible-kjv, cgoban, gnugo, pachi, wmpuzzle, wmweather, wmwork, xfaces, xnecview, xscavenger, xtrlock, virt-top. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Untested changes:

reproducible.debian.net Once again, Vagrant Cascadian is providing another armhf build system, allowing to run 6 more armhf builder jobs, right there. (h01ger) Stop requiring a modified debhelper and adapt to the latest dpkg experimental version by providing a predetermined identifier for the .buildinfo filename. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) New X.509 certificates were set up for jenkins.debian.net and reproducible.debian.net using Let's Encrypt!. Thanks to GlobalSign for providing certificates for the last year free of charge. (h01ger)

Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 32 updated in the previous week. FTBFS issues filled: 29. Thanks to Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issue identified: timestamps_in_manpages_added_by_golang_cobra.

Misc. Most of the minutes from the meetings held in Athens in December 2015 are now available to the public.

16 January 2016

Russ Allbery: podlators 4.05

Getting all the details right in a highly portable Perl core module that tries to support very old versions of Perl is tricky! And I clearly didn't do a good job of documenting previous decisions. This release reintroduces pod2man.PL and pod2text.PL generator scripts to get the right Perl invocation. I thought ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build now took care of this, but apparently they only take care of this on UNIX platforms, not on the non-UNIX platforms that require special execution logic. Thanks to a patch by Niko Tyni, this version of Pod::Man also falls back to non-utf8 behavior if the utf8 option is specified but the Encode module doesn't exist. This can help with some cross-build situations. I also finally figured out the problem with occasional test failures on random platforms: I was trying to clean up the temporary directory used by tests after each test, but the CPAN test systems run all the tests in parallel, so the tests were racing with each other. This release just leaves the temporary directory around and deletes it in make clean. You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.

15 January 2016

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.19 released (backup software)

I have just released version 1.19 of Obnam, the backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what's new in this version. NOTE: Obnam has an EXPERIMENTAL repository format under development, called green-albatross. It is NOT meant for real use. It is likely to change in incompatible ways without warning. Do not use it unless you're willing to lose your backup. Version 1.19, released 2016-01-15 Bug fixes: Improvements to the manual: Improvements to functionality:

13 January 2016

Norbert Preining: Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt

Since moving to Japan, I got more and more interested in history, especially the recent history of the 20th century. The book I just finished, Ian Buruma (Wiki, home page) Wages of Guilt Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Independent, NYRB), has been a revelation for me. As an Austrian living in Japan, I am experiencing the discrepancy between these two countries with respect to their treatment of war legacy practically daily, and many of my blog entries revolve around the topic of Japanese non-reconciliation.
Willy Brandt went down on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, after a functioning democracy had been established in the Federal Republic of Germany, not before. But Japan, shielded from the evil world, has grown into an Oskar Matzerath: opportunistic, stunted, and haunted by demons, which it tries to ignore by burying them in the sand, like Oskar s drum.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Clearing Up the Ruins
Buruma-Wages_of_Guilt The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.
This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Romance of the Ruins
Only thinking about giving a halfway full account of this book is something impossible for me. The sheer amount of information, both on the German and Japanese side, is impressive. His incredible background (studies of Chinese literature and Japanese movie!) and long years as journalist, editor, etc, enriches the book with facets normally not available: In particular his knowledge of both the German and Japanese movie history, and the reflection of history in movies, were complete new aspects for me (see my recent post (in Japanese)). The book is comprised of four parts: The first with the chapters War Against the West and Romance of the Ruins; the second with the chapters Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking; the third with History on Trial, Textbook Resistance, and Memorials, Museums, and Monuments; and the last part with A Normal Country, Two Normal Towns, and Clearing Up the Ruins. Let us look at the chapters in turn: The boook somehow left me with a bleak impression of Japanese post-war times as well as Japanese future. Having read other books about the political ignorance in Japan (Norma Field s In the realm of a dying emperor, or the Chibana history), Buruma s characterization of Japanese politics is striking. He couldn t foresee the recent changes in legislation pushed through by the Abe government actually breaking the constitution, or the rewriting of history currently going on with respect to comfort women and Nanking. But reading his statement about Article Nine of the constitution and looking at the changes in political attitude, I am scared about where Japan is heading to:
The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre. The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Nanking
While there are signs of resistance in the streets of Japan (Okinawa and the Hanako bay, the demonstrations against secrecy law and reversion of the constitution), we are still to see a change influenced by the people in a country ruled and distributed by oligarchs. I don t think there will be another Nanking Massacre in the near future, but Buruma s books shows that we are heading back to a nationalistic regime similar to pre-war times, just covered with a democratic veil to distract critics.
I close with several other quotes from the book that caught my attention: In the preface and introduction:
[ ] mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany.
In Romance of the Ruins:
The point of all this is that Ikeda s promise of riches was the final stage of what came to be known as the reverse course, the turn away from a leftist, pacifist, neutral Japan a Japan that would never again be involved in any wars, that would resist any form of imperialism, that had, in short, turned its back for good on its bloody past. The Double Your Incomes policy was a deliberate ploy to draw public attention away from constitutional issues.
In Hiroshima:
The citizens of Hiroshima were indeed victims, primarily of their own military rulers. But when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an Aggressors Corner was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the flow of history .
In Nanking, by the governmental pseudo-historian Tanaka:
Unlike in Europe or China, writes Tanaka, you won t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan. This is because the Japanese have a different sense of values from the Chinese or the Westerners.
In History on Trial:
In 1950, Becker wrote that few things have done more to hinder true historical self-knowledge in Germany than the war crimes trials. He stuck to this belief. Becker must be taken seriously, for he is not a right-wing apologist for the Nazi past, but an eminent liberal.
There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a military campaign, not a planned genocide of a people that included the country s own citizens. And besides, those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as logs ) carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria, were passed over during the Tokyo trial. The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731 of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors responsible were allowed to go free in exchange for their data.
Some Japanese have suggested that they should have conducted their own war crimes trials. The historian Hata Ikuhiko thought the Japanese leaders should have been tried according to existing Japanese laws, either in military or in civil courts. The Japanese judges, he believed, might well have been more severe than the Allied tribunal in Tokyo. And the consequences would have been healthier. If found guilty, the spirits of the defendants would not have ended up being enshrined at Yasukuni. The Tokyo trial, he said, purified the crimes of the accused and turned them into martyrs. If they had been tried in domestic courts, there is a good chance the real criminals would have been flushed out.
After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.
Emperor Hirohito was not Hitler; Hitler was no mere Shrine. But the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hider s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
Emperor Hirohito, the shadowy figure who changed after the war from navy uniforms to gray suits, was not personally comparable to Hitler, but his psychological role was remarkably similar.
In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history. For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
In Memorials, Museums, and Monuments:
If one disregards, for a moment, the differences in style between Shinto and Christianity, the Yasukuni Shrine, with its relics, its sacred ground, its bronze paeans to noble sacrifice, is not so very different from many European memorials after World War I. By and large, World War II memorials in Europe and the United States (though not the Soviet Union) no longer glorify the sacrifice of the fallen soldier. The sacrificial cult and the romantic elevation of war to a higher spiritual plane no longer seemed appropriate after Auschwitz. The Christian knight, bearing the cross of king and country, was not resurrected. But in Japan, where the war was still truly a war (not a Holocaust), and the symbolism still redolent of religious exultation, such shrines as Yasukuni still carry the torch of nineteenth-century nationalism. Hence the image of the nation owing its restoration to the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.
In A Normal Country:
The mayor received a letter from a Shinto priest in which the priest pointed out that it was un-Japanese to demand any more moral responsibility from the emperor than he had already taken. Had the emperor not demonstrated his deep sorrow every year, on the anniversary of Japan s surrender? Besides, he wrote, it was wrong to have spoken about the emperor in such a manner, even as the entire nation was deeply worried about his health. Then he came to the main point: It is a common error among Christians and people with Western inclinations, including so-called intellectuals, to fail to grasp that Western societies and Japanese society are based on fundamentally different religious concepts . . . Forgetting this premise, they attempt to place a Western structure on a Japanese foundation. I think this kind of mistake explains the demand for the emperor to bear full responsibility.
In Two Normal Towns:
The bust of the man caught my attention, but not because it was in any way unusual; such busts of prominent local figures can be seen everywhere in Japan. This one, however, was particularly grandiose. Smiling across the yard, with a look of deep satisfaction over his many achievements, was Hatazawa Kyoichi. His various functions and titles were inscribed below his bust. He had been an important provincial bureaucrat, a pillar of the sumo wrestling establishment, a member of various Olympic committees, and the recipient of some of the highest honors in Japan. The song engraved on the smooth stone was composed in praise of his rich life. There was just one small gap in Hatazawa s life story as related on his monument: the years from 1941 to 1945 were missing. Yet he had not been idle then, for he was the man in charge of labor at the Hanaoka mines.
In Clearing Up the Ruins:
But the question in American minds was understandable: could one trust a nation whose official spokesmen still refused to admit that their country had been responsible for starting a war? In these Japanese evasions there was something of the petulant child, stamping its foot, shouting that it had done nothing wrong, because everybody did it.
Japan seems at times not so much a nation of twelve-year-olds, to repeat General MacArthur s phrase, as a nation of people longing to be twelve-year-olds, or even younger, to be at that golden age when everything was secure and responsibility and conformity were not yet required.
For General MacArthur was right: in 1945, the Japanese people were political children. Until then, they had been forced into a position of complete submission to a state run by authoritarian bureaucrats and military men, and to a religious cult whose high priest was also formally chief of the armed forces and supreme monarch of the empire.
I saw Jew S ss that same year, at a screening for students of the film academy in Berlin. This showing, too, was followed by a discussion. The students, mostly from western Germany, but some from the east, were in their early twenties. They were dressed in the international uniform of jeans, anoraks, and work shirts. The professor was a man in his forties, a 68er named Karsten Witte. He began the discussion by saying that he wanted the students to concentrate on the aesthetics of the film more than the story. To describe the propaganda, he said, would simply be banal: We all know the what, so let s talk about the how. I thought of my fellow students at the film school in Tokyo more than fifteen years before. How many of them knew the what of the Japanese war in Asia.

4 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 36 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 27th and January 2nd: Infrastructure dak now silently accepts and discards .buildinfo files (commit 1, 2), thanks to Niels Thykier and Ansgar Burchardt. This was later confirmed as working by Mattia Rizzolo. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: banshee-community-extensions, javamail, mono-debugger-libs, python-avro. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Untested changes: reproducible.debian.net The testing distribution (the upcoming stretch) is now tested on armhf. (h01ger) Four new armhf build nodes provided by Vagrant Cascandian were integrated in the infrastructer. This allowed for 9 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger) The RPM-based build system, koji, is now in unstable and testing. (Marek Marczykowski-G recki, Ximin Luo). Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 71 added and 53 updated in the previous week. 58 new FTBFS reports were made by Chris Lamb and Chris West. New issues identified this week: nondeterminstic_ordering_in_gsettings_glib_enums_xml, nondeterminstic_output_in_warnings_generated_by_breathe, qt_translate_noop_nondeterminstic_ordering. Misc. Steven Chamberlain explained in length why reproducible cross-building across architectures mattered, and posted results of his tests comparing a stage1 debootstrapped chroot of linux-i386 once done from official Debian packages, the others cross-built from kfreebsd-amd64.

3 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 35 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 20th to December 26th: Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental versions of debhelper (twice!) and dpkg on top of the latest releases. Reiner Herrmann submited a patch for mozilla-devscripts to sort the file list in generated preferences.js files. To be able to lift the restriction that packages must be built in the same path, translation support for the __FILE__ C pre-processor macro would also be required. Joerg Sonnenberger submitted a patch back in 2010 that would still be useful today. Chris Lamb started work on providing a deterministic mode for debootstrap. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bouncycastle, cairo-dock-plug-ins, darktable, gshare, libgpod, pafy, ruby-redis-namespace, ruby-rouge, sparkleshare. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Statistics for package sets are now visible for the armhf architecture. (h01ger) The second build now has a longer timeout (18 hours) than the first build (12 hours). This should prevent wasting resources when a machine is loaded. (h01ger) Builds of Arch Linux packages are now done using a tmpfs. (h01ger) 200 GiB have been added to jenkins.debian.net (thanks to ProfitBricks!) to make room for new jobs. The current count is at 962 and growing! diffoscope development Aside from some minor bugs that have been fixed, a one-line change made huge memory (and time) savings as the output of transformation tool is now streamed line by line instead of loaded entirely in memory at once. disorderfs development Andrew Ayer released disorderfs version 0.4.2-1 on December 22th. It fixes a memory corruption error when processing command line arguments that could cause command line options to be ignored. Documentation update Many small improvements for the documentation on reproducible-builds.org sent by Georg Koppen were merged. Package reviews 666 (!) reviews have been removed, 189 added and 162 updated in the previous week. 151 new fail to build from source reports have been made by Chris West, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified: unsorted_filelist_in_xul_ext_preferences, nondeterminstic_output_generated_by_moarvm. Misc. Steven Chamberlain drew our attention to one analysis of the Juniper ScreenOS Authentication Backdoor: Whilst this may have been added in source code, it was well-disguised in the disassembly and just 7 instructions long. I thought this was a good example of the current state-of-the-art, and why we'd like our binaries and eventually, installer and VM images reproducible IMHO. Joanna Rutkowska has mentioned possible ways for Qubes to become reproducible on their development mailing-list.

2 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 33 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 6th and December 12th: Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann rebased our experimental version of doxygen on version 1.8.9.1-6. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to make the manpages generated by ruby-ronn reproducible by using the locale-agnostic %Y-%m-%d for the dates. Daniel Kahn Gillmor took another shot at the issue of source path captured in DWARF symbols. A patch has been sent for review by GCC upstream to add the ability to read an environment variable with -fdebug-prefix-map. Packages fixed The following 24 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: gkeyfile-sharp, gprbuild, graphmonkey, gthumb, haskell-yi-language, ion, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformat-smile, jackson-dataformat-xml, jnr-ffi, libcommons-net-java, libproxy, maven-shared-utils, monodevelop-database, mydumper, ndesk-dbus, nini, notify-sharp, pixz, protozero, python-rtslib-fb, slurm-llnl, taglib-sharp, tomboy-latex. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: These uploads might have fixed reproducibility issues but could not be tested yet: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Files created with diffoscope now have diffoscope in their name instead debbindiff. (h01ger) Hostnames of first and second build node are now recorded and shown in the build history. (Mattia Rizzolo) Exchanges have started with F-Droid developers to better understand what would be required to test F-Droid applications. (h01ger) A first small set of Fedora 23 packages is now also being tested while development on a new framework for testing RPMs in general has begun. A new Jenkins job has been added to set up to mock, the build system used by Fedora. Another new job takes care of testing RPMs from Fedora 23 on x86_64. So far only 151 packages from the buildsys-build group are tested (currently all unreproducible), but the plan is to build all 17,000 source packages in Fedora 23 and rawhide. The page presenting the results should also soon be improved. (h01ger, Dhiru Kholia) For Arch Linux, all 2223 packages from the extra repository will also be tested from now on. Packages in extra" are tested every four weeks, while those from core every week. Statistics are now displayed alongside the results. (h01ger) jenkins.debian.net has been updated to jenkins-job-builder version 1.3.0. Many job configurations have been simplified and refactored using features of the new version. This was another milestone for the jenkins.debian.org migration. (Phil Hands, h01ger) diffoscope development Chris Lamb announced try.diffoscope.org: an online service that runs diffoscope on user provided files. Screenshot of try.diffoscope.org Improvements are welcome. The application is licensed under the AGPLv3. On diffoscope itself, most pending patches have now been merged. Expect a release soon! Most of the code implementing parallel processing has been polished. Sadly, unpacking archive is CPU-bound in most cases, so the current thread-only implementation does not offer much gain on big packages. More work is still require to also add concurrent processes. Documentation update Ximin Luo has started to write a specification for buildinfo files that could become a larger platform than the limited set of features that were thought so far for Debian .buildinfo. Package reviews 113 reviews have been removed, 111 added and 56 updated in the previous week. 42 new FTBFS bugs were opened by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_docbook_dbtimestamp, timestamps_in_sym_l_files_generated_by_malaga, timestamps_in_edj_files_generated_by_edje_cc. Misc. Chris Lamb presented reproducible builds at skroutz.gr.

20 December 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 34 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 13th to December 19th: Infrastructure Niels Thykier started implementing support for .buildinfo files in dak. A very preliminary commit was made by Ansgar Burchardt to prevent .buildinfo files from being removed from the upload queue. Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental debhelper with the changes from the latest upload. New fixes have been merged by OCaml upstream. Packages fixed The following 39 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-mime4j, avahi-sharp, blam, bless, cecil-flowanalysis, cecil, coco-cs, cowbell, cppformat, dbus-sharp-glib, dbus-sharp, gdcm, gnome-keyring-sharp, gudev-sharp-1.0, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jboss-classfilewriter, jboss-jdeparser2, jetty8, json-spirit, lat, leveldb-sharp, libdecentxml-java, libjavaewah-java, libkarma, mono.reflection, monobristol, nuget, pinta, snakeyaml, taglib-sharp, tangerine, themonospot, tomboy-latex, widemargin, wordpress, xsddiagram, xsp, zeitgeist-sharp. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Packages in experimental are now tested on armhf. (h01ger) Arch Linux packages in the multilib and community repositories (4,000 more source packages) are also being tested. All of these test results are better analyzed and nicely displayed together with each package. (h01ger) For Fedora, build jobs can now run in parallel. Two are currently running, now testing reproducibility of 785 source packages from Fedora 23. mock/1.2.3-1.1 has been uploaded to experimental to better build RPMs. (h01ger) Work has started on having automatic build node pools to maximize use of armhf build nodes. (Vagrant Cascadian) diffoscope development Version 43 has been released on December 15th. It has been dubbed as epic! as it contains many contributions that were written around the summit in Athens. Baptiste Daroussin found that running diffoscope on some Tar archives could overwrite arbitrary files. This has been fixed by using libarchive instead of Python internal Tar library and adding a sanity check for destination paths. In any cases, until proper sandboxing is implemented, don't run diffosope on unstrusted inputs outside an isolated, throw-away system. Mike Hommey identified that the CBFS comparator would needlessly waste time scanning big files. It will now not consider any files bigger than 24 MiB 8 MiB more than the largest ROM created by coreboot at this time. An encoding issue related to Zip files has also been fixed. (Lunar) New comparators have been added: Android dex files (Reiner Herrmann), filesystem images using libguestfs (Reiner Herrmann), icons and JPEG images using libcaca (Chris Lamb), and OS X binaries (Clemens Lang). The comparator for Free Pascal Compilation Unit will now only be used when the unit version matches the compiler one. (Levente Polyak) A new multi-file HTML output with on-demand loading of long diffs is available through the --html-dir option. On-demand loading requires jQuery which path can be specified through the --jquery option. The diffs can also be simply browsed for non-JavaScript users or when jQuery is not available. (Joachim Breitner) Example of on-demand loading in diffosope Portability toward other systems has been improved: old versions of GNU diff are now supported (Mike McQuaid), suggestion of the appropriate locale is now the more generic en_US.UTF-8 (Ed Maste), the --list-tools option can now support multiple systems (Mattia Rizzolo, Levente Polyak, Lunar). Many internal changes and code clean-ups have been made, paving the way for parallel processing. (Lunar) Version 44 was released on December 18th fixing an issue affecting .deb lacking a md5sums file introduced in a previous refactoring (Lunar). Support has been added for Mozilla optimized Zip files. (Mike Hommey). The HTML output has been optimized in size (Mike Hommey, Esa Peuha, Lunar), speed (Lunar), and will now properly number lines (Mike Hommey). A message will always be displayed when lines are ignored at the end of a diff (Lunar). For portability and consistency, Python os.walk() function is now used instead of find to perform directory listing. (Lunar) Documentation update Package reviews 143 reviews have been removed, 69 added and 22 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb reported 12 new FTBFS issues. News issues identified this week: random_order_in_init_py_generated_by_python-genpy, timestamps_in_copyright_added_by_perl_dist_zilla, random_contents_in_dat_files_generated_by_chasen-dictutils_makemat, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_pandoc. Chris West did some improvements on the scripts used to manage notes in the misc repository. Misc. Accounts of the reproducible builds summit in Athens were written by Thomas Klausner from NetBSD and Hans-Christoph Steiner from The Guardian Project. Some openSUSE developers are working on a hackweek on reproducible builds which was discussed on the opensuse-packaging mailing-list.

13 December 2015

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/38-50

it looks like this autumn was not my best blogging time: this is the first posting in 3 months. anyway, I wanted to give a quick overview about my work on RC bugs. again nothing exciting, mostly just trying to fix the ones popping up in the pkg-perl team.

11 December 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 32 in Stretch cycle

The first reproducible world summit was held in Athens, Greece, from December 1st-3rd with the support of the Linux Foundation, the Open Tech Fund, and Google. Faidon Liambotis has been an amazing help to sort out all local details. People at ImpactHub Athens have been perfect hosts. North of Athens from the Acropolis with ImpactHub in the center Nearly 40 participants from 14 different free software project had very busy days sharing knowledge, building understanding, and producing actual patches. Anyone interested in cross project discussions should join the rb-general mailing-list. What follows focuses mostly on what happened for Debian this previous week. A more detailed report about the summit will follow soon. You can also read the ones from Joachim Breitner from Debian, Clemens Lang from MacPorts, Georg Koppen from Tor, Dhiru Kholia from Fedora, and Ludovic Court s wrote one for Guix and for the GNU project. The Acropolis from Infrastructure Several discussions at the meeting helped refine a shared understanding of what kind of information should be recorded on a build, and how they could be used. Daniel Kahn Gillmor sent a detailed update on how .buildinfo files should become part of the Debian archive. Some key changes compared to what we had in mind at DebConf15: Hopefully, ftpmasters will be able to comment on the updated proposal soon. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: fades, triplane, caml-crush, globus-authz. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: akira sent proposals on how to make bash reproducible. Alexander Couzens submitted a patch upstream to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in grub image generator (#787795). reproducible.debian.net An issue with some armhf build nodes was tracked down to a bad interaction between uname26 personality and new glibc (Vagrant Cascadian). A Debian package was created for koji, the RPM building and tracking system used by Fedora amongst others. It is currently waiting for review in the NEW queue. (Ximin Luo, Marek Marczykowski-G recki) diffoscope development diffoscope now has a dedicated mailing list to better accommodate its growing user and developer base. Going through diffoscope's guts together enabled several new contributors. Baptiste Daroussin, Ed Maste, Clemens Lang, Mike McQuaid, Joachim Breitner all contributed their first patches to improve portability or add new features. Regular contributors Chris Lamb, Reiner Herrmann, and Levente Polyak also submitted improvements. diffoscope hacking session in Athens The next release should support more operating systems, filesystem image comparison via libguestfs, HTML reports with on-demand loading, and parallel processing for the most noticeable improvements. Package reviews 27 reviews have been removed, 17 added and 14 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb and Val Lorentz filed 4 new FTBFS reports. Misc. Baptiste Daroussin has started to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in FreeBSD in libpkg and the ports tree. Thanks Joachim Breitner and h01ger for the pictures.

30 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 31 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch against debhelper to make dh_installinit source files in a stable order. Chris Lamb found how to make cython output deterministic by ordering the keys used to traverse a dict. Reiner Herrmann proposed a patch for pyside-tools to remove the timestamps embedded by rcc in the generated Python code. Mattia Rizzolo rebased our custom version of debhelper on version 9.20151126. As no objections have been made so far, Mattia Rizzolo has filled #805872 asking -Wdate-time to be turned on by default in dpkg-buildflag. Guillem has since sent a final warning before proceeding as such in the next dpkg upload. Russ Allbery added support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in podlators 4.00 which Niko Tyni intend to backport to Perl 5.22. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: fontforge, golang-github-tinylib-msgp, libpango-perl, libparanamer-java, libxaw, sqljet, stringtemplate4, uzbl, zope-mysqlda. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Lunar reported two issues making xz-utils unreproducible (#806328, #806331). reproducible.debian.net A seventh armhf build node has been added (resulting of two more armhf build jobs). Thanks to Vagrant Cascadian for putting this Raspberry Pi 2B to help. (h01ger) jenkins.debian.net has been made more robust against network and proxy failures. (h01ger) A new 100 GB partition has been set up on reproducible.debian.net to prevent disk space issues. Thanks to ProfitBricks for its continuous support to our continuous test system. (h01ger) New graphs showing usertagged bugs have been added on the dashboard to measure the progress without FTBFS issues. Please note that comparing the two graphs might be misleading as more than 1300 FTBFS bugs have been inventoried. (h01ger) Package reviews 78 reviews have been removed, 116 added and 49 updated this week. 25 new FTBFS have been filed by Chris West, Chris Lamb and Santiago Vila. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_documentation_generated_with_libwibble, copyright_year_in_documentation_generated_by_sphinx, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_glib_genpod, random_order_of_tmpfiles_in_postinst, random_order_in_cython_output, timestamps_in_python_code_generated_by_pyside. Reiner Herrmann and Lunar improved the prebuilder script: the script can now be called through a symlink, run parallel builds, calls diffoscope by its new name and ensure to install its recommends, and save the text output aside the HTML one. Reiner also added a script to lookup the last update of notes for a given package. Misc. Santiago Villa has been recently working on making sure that Arch:all packages were properly buildable by running dpkg-buildpackage -A. This uncovered a question that is probably not currently addressed by the policy: on which architectures should architecture-independent be buildable?

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