Search Results: "roland"

24 March 2017

Sylvain Beucler: Practical basics of reproducible builds

As GNU FreeDink upstream, I'd very much like to offer pre-built binaries: one (1) official, tested, current, distro-agnostic version of the game with its dependencies.
I'm actually already doing that for the Windows version.
One issue though: people have to trust me -- and my computer's integrity.
Reproducible builds could address that.
My release process is tightly controlled, but is my project reproducible? If not, what do I need? Let's check! I quickly see that documentation is getting better, namely https://reproducible-builds.org/ :)
(The first docs I read on reproducibility looked more like a crazed date-o-phobic rant than actual solution - plus now we have SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH implemented in gcc ;)) However I was left unsatisfied by the very high-level viewpoint and the lack of concrete examples.
The document points to various issues but is very vague about what tools are impacted. So let's do some tests!
Let's start with a trivial program:
$ cat > hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)  
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
 
OK, first does GCC compile this reproducibly?
I'm not sure because I heard of randomness in identifiers and such in the compilation process...
$ gcc-5 hello.c -o hello-5
$ md5sum hello-5
a00416d7392442321bad4afc5a461321  hello-5
$ gcc-5 hello.c -o hello-5
$ md5sum hello-5
a00416d7392442321bad4afc5a461321  hello-5
Cool, ELF compiler output is stable through time!
Now do 2 versions of GCC compile a hello world identically?
$ gcc-6 hello.c -o hello-6
$ md5sum hello-6
f7f52c2f5f82fe2a95061a771a6c5acd  hello-6
$ hexcompare hello-5 hello-6
[lots of red]
...
Well let's not get our hopes too high ;)
Trivial build options change?
$ gcc-6 hello.c -lc -o hello-6
$ gcc-6 -lc hello.c -o hello-6b
$ md5sum hello-6 hello-6b
f7f52c2f5f82fe2a95061a771a6c5acd  hello-6
f73ee6d8c3789fd8f899f5762025420e  hello-6b
$ hexcompare hello-6 hello-6b
[lots of red]
...
OK, let's be very careful with build options then. What about 2 different build paths?
$ cd ..
$ cp -a repro/ repro2/
$ cd repro2/
$ gcc-6 hello.c -o hello-6
$ md5sum hello-6
f7f52c2f5f82fe2a95061a771a6c5acd  hello-6
Basic compilation is stable across directories.
Now I tried recompiling identically FreeDink on 2 different git clones.
Disappointment:
$ md5sum freedink/native/src/freedink freedink2/native/src/freedink
839ccd9180c72343e23e5d9e2e65e237  freedink/native/src/freedink
6d5dc6aab321fab01b424ac44c568dcf  freedink2/native/src/freedink
$ hexcompare freedink2/native/src/freedink freedink/native/src/freedink
[lots of red]
Hmm, what about stripped versions?
$ strip freedink/native/src/freedink freedink2/native/src/freedink
$ md5sum freedink/native/src/freedink freedink2/native/src/freedink
415e96bb54456f3f2a759f404f18c711  freedink/native/src/freedink
e0702d798807c83d21f728106c9261ad  freedink2/native/src/freedink
$ hexcompare freedink/native/src/freedink freedink2/native/src/freedink
[1 single red spot]
OK, what's happening? diffoscope to the rescue:
$ diffoscope freedink/native/src/freedink freedink2/native/src/freedink
--- freedink/native/src/freedink
+++ freedink2/native/src/freedink
  readelf --wide --notes  
  @@ -3,8 +3,8 @@
     Owner                 Data size  Description
     GNU                  0x00000010  NT_GNU_ABI_TAG (ABI version tag)
       OS: Linux, ABI: 2.6.32
   
   Displaying notes found in: .note.gnu.build-id
     Owner                 Data size  Description
     GNU                  0x00000014  NT_GNU_BUILD_ID (unique build ID bitstring)
  -    Build ID: a689574d69072bb64b28ffb82547e126284713fa
  +    Build ID: d7be191a61e84648a58c18e9c108b3f3ce500302
What on earth is Build ID and how it is computed?
After much digging, I find it's a 2008 plan with application in selecting matching detached debugging symbols.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RolandMcGrath/BuildID is the most detailed overview/rationale I found.
It is supposed to be computed from parts of the binary. It's actually pretty resistant to changes, e.g. I could add the missing "return 0;" in my hello source and get the exact same Build ID!
On the other hand my FreeDink binaries do match except for the Build ID so there must be a catch. Let's try our basic example with default ./configure CFLAGS:
$ (cd repro/ && gcc -g -O2 hello.c -o hello)
$ (cd repro/ && gcc -g -O2 hello.c -o hello-b)
$ md5sum repro/hello repro/hello-b
6b2cd79947d7c5ed2e505ddfce167116  repro/hello
6b2cd79947d7c5ed2e505ddfce167116  repro/hello-b
# => OK for now
$ (cd repro2/ && gcc -g -O2 hello.c -o hello)
$ md5sum repro2/hello
20b4d09d94de5840400be05bc76e4172  repro2/hello
$ strip repro/hello repro2/hello
$ diffoscope repro/hello repro2/hello
--- repro/hello
+++ repro2/hello2
  readelf --wide --notes  
  @@ -3,8 +3,8 @@
     Owner                 Data size  Description
     GNU                  0x00000010  NT_GNU_ABI_TAG (ABI version tag)
       OS: Linux, ABI: 2.6.32
   
   Displaying notes found in: .note.gnu.build-id
     Owner                 Data size  Description
     GNU                  0x00000014  NT_GNU_BUILD_ID (unique build ID bitstring)
  -    Build ID: 462a3c613537bb57f20bd3ccbe6b7f6d2bdc72ba
  +    Build ID: b4b448cf93e7b541ad995075d2b688ef296bd88b
# => issue reproduced with -g -O2 and different build directories
$ (cd repro/ && gcc -O2 hello.c -o hello)
$ (cd repro2/ && gcc -O2 hello.c -o hello)
$ md5sum repro/hello repro2/hello
1571d45eb5807f7a074210be17caa87b  repro/hello
1571d45eb5807f7a074210be17caa87b  repro2/hello
# => culprit is not -O2, so culprit is -g
Bummer. So the build ID must be computed also from the debug symbols, even if I strip them afterwards :(
OK, so when https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/build-path/ says "Some tools will record the path of the source files in their output", that means the compiler, and more importantly the stripped executable. Conclusion: apparently to achieve reproducible builds I need identical full build paths and to keep track of them. What about Windows/MinGW btw?
$ /opt/mxe/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32.static-gcc hello.c -o hello.exe
$ md5sum hello.exe 
e0fa685f6866029b8e03f9f2837dc263  hello.exe
$ /opt/mxe/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32.static-gcc hello.c -o hello.exe
$ md5sum hello.exe 
df7566c0ac93ea4a0b53f4af83d7fbc9  hello.exe
$ /opt/mxe/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32.static-gcc hello.c -o hello.exe
$ md5sum hello.exe 
bbf4ab22cbe2df1ddc21d6203e506eb5  hello.exe
PE compiler output is not stable through time.
(any clue?) OK, there's still a long road ahead of us...
There are lots of other questions.
Is autoconf output reproducible?
Does it actually matter if autoconf is reproducible if upstream is providing a pre-generated ./configure?
If not what about all the documentation on making tarballs reproducible, along with the strip-nondeterminism tool?
Where do we draw the line between build and build environment?
What are the legal issues of distributing a docker-based build environment without every single matching distro source packages? That was my modest contribution to practical reproducible builds documentation for developers, I'd very much like to hear about more of it.
Who knows, maybe in the near future we'll get reproducible official builds for Eclipse, ZAP, JetBrains, Krita, Android SDK/NDK... :)

28 February 2017

Gunnar Wolf: Much belated book presentation, this Saturday

Once again, I'm making an announcement mainly for my local circle of friends and (gasp!) followers. For those of you over 100Km away from Mexico City, please disregard this message. Back in July 2015, and after two years of hard work, my university finished the publishing step of my second book. This is a textbook for the subject I teach at Computer Engineering: Operating Systems Fundamentals. The book is, from its inception, fully available online under a permissive (CC-BY) license. One of the books aimed contributions is to present a text natively written in Spanish. Besides, our goal (I coordinated a team of authors, working with two colleagues from Rosario, Argentina, and one from Cauca, Colombia) was to provide a book students can easily and legally share with no legal issues. I have got many good reviews so far, and after teaching based on it for four years (while working on it and after its publication), I can attest the material is light enough to fit in a Bachelors level degree, while it's deep enough to make our students sweat healthily ;-) Anyway: I have been scheduled to present the book at my university's main book show, 38 Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Miner a this Saturday, 2017.03.04 16:00; Sal n Manuel Tols . What's even better: This time, I won't be preparing a speech! The book will be presented by my two very good friends, Jos Mar a Serralde and Rolando Cedillo. Both of them are clever, witty, fun, and a real honor to work with. Of course, having them present our book is more than a double honor. So, everybody who can make it: FIL Miner a is always great and fun. Come share the love! Come have a book! Or, at least, have a good time and a nice chat with us!

6 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 75 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 25 and Saturday October 1 2016: Statistics For the first time, we reached 91% reproducible packages in our testing framework on testing/amd64 using a determistic build path. (This is what we recommend to make packages in Stretch reproducible.) For unstable/amd64, where we additionally test for reproducibility across different build paths we are at almost 76% again. IRC meetings We have a poll to set a time for a new regular IRC meeting. If you would like to attend, please input your available times and we will try to accommodate for you. There was a trial IRC meeting on Friday, 2016-09-31 1800 UTC. Unfortunately, we did not activate meetbot. Despite this participants consider the meeting a success as several topics where discussed (eg changes to IRC notifications of tests.r-b.o) and the meeting stayed within one our length. Upcoming events Reproduce and Verify Filesystems - Vincent Batts, Red Hat - Berlin (Germany), 5th October, 14:30 - 15:20 @ LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe 2016. From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE & coreboot - Holger "h01ger" Levsen and Alexander "lynxis" Couzens - Berlin (Germany), 13th October, 11:00 - 11:25 @ OpenWrt Summit 2016. Introduction to Reproducible Builds - Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the SeaGL.org Conference In Seattle (USA), November 11th-12th, 2016. Previous events GHC Determinism - Bartosz Nitka, Facebook - Nara (Japan), 24th September, ICPF 2016. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Meskes uploaded bsdmainutils/9.0.11 to unstable with a fix for #830259 based on Reiner Herrmann's patch. This fixed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder issue in the affected packages (freebsd-libs, mmh). devscripts/2.16.8 was uploaded to unstable. It includes a debrepro script by Antonio Terceiro which is similar in purpose to reprotest but more lightweight; specific to Debian packages and without support for virtual servers or configurable variations. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible in our testing framework after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 77 package reviews have been added, 178 have been updated and 80 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 6 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work As part of reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development A new version of diffoscope 61 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Post-release there were further contributions from: reprotest development A new version of reprotest 0.3.2 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from: Post-release there were further contributions from: tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

20 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 51 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 10th and April 16th 2016: Toolchain fixes Antoine Beaupr suggested that gitpkg stops recording timestamps when creating upstream archives. Antoine Beaupr also pointed out that git-buildpackage diverges from the default gzip settings which is a problem for reproducibly recreating released tarballs which were made using the defaults. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch extending sphinx SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to copyright year. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330, avis, brailleutils, charactermanaj, classycle, commons-io, commons-javaflow, commons-jci, gap-radiroot, jebl2, jetty, libcommons-el-java, libcommons-jxpath-java, libjackson-json-java, libjogl2-java, libmicroba-java, libproxool-java, libregexp-java, mobile-atlas-creator, octave-econometrics, octave-linear-algebra, octave-odepkg, octave-optiminterp, rapidsvn, remotetea, ruby-rinku, tachyon, xhtmlrenderer. 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: diffoscope development Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek noted in #820631 that diffoscope doesn't work properly when a file contains several cpio archives. Package reviews 21 reviews have been added, 14 updated and 22 removed in this week. New issue found: timestamps_in_htm_by_gap. Chris Lamb reported 10 new FTBFS issues. Misc. The video and the slides from the talk "Reproducible builds ecosystem" at LibrePlanet 2016 have been published now. This week's edition was written by Lunar and Holger Levsen. h01ger automated the maintenance and publishing of this weekly newsletter via git.

1 February 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 40 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 24th and January 30th:

Media coverage Holger Levsen was interviewed by the FOSDEM team to introduce his talk on Sunday 31st.

Toolchain fixes Jonas Smedegaard uploaded d-shlibs/0.63 which makes the order of dependencies generated by d-devlibdeps stable accross locales. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: appstream-glib, aptitude, arbtt, btrfs-tools, cinnamon-settings-daemon, cppcheck, debian-security-support, easytag, gitit, gnash, gnome-control-center, gnome-keyring, gnome-shell, gnome-software, graphite2, gtk+2.0, gupnp, gvfs, gyp, hgview, htmlcxx, i3status, imms, irker, jmapviewer, katarakt, kmod, lastpass-cli, libaccounts-glib, libam7xxx, libldm, libopenobex, libsecret, linthesia, mate-session-manager, mpris-remote, network-manager, paprefs, php-opencloud, pisa, pyacidobasic, python-pymzml, python-pyscss, qtquick1-opensource-src, rdkit, ruby-rails-html-sanitizer, shellex, slony1-2, spacezero, spamprobe, sugar-toolkit-gtk3, tachyon, tgt. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:
  • gnubg/1.05.000-4 by Russ Allbery.
  • grcompiler/4.2-6 by Hideki Yamane.
  • sdlgfx/2.0.25-5 fix by Felix Geyer, uploaded by Gianfranco Costamagna.
Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #812876 on glib2.0 by Lunar: ensure that functions are sorted using the C locale when giotypefuncs.c is generated.

diffoscope development diffoscope 48 was released on January 26th. It fixes several issues introduced by the retrieval of extra symbols from Debian debug packages. It also restores compatibility with older versions of binutils which does not support readelf --decompress.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.015-1 was uploaded on January 27th. It fixes handling of signed JAR files which are now going to be ignored to keep the signatures intact.

Package reviews 54 reviews have been removed, 36 added and 17 updated in the previous week. 30 new FTBFS bugs have been submitted by Chris Lamb, Michael Tautschnig, Mattia Rizzolo, Tobias Frost.

Misc. Alexander Couzens and Bryan Newbold have been busy fixing more issues in OpenWrt. Version 1.6.3 of FreeBSD's package manager pkg(8) now supports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Ross Karchner did a lightning talk about reproducible builds at his work place and shared the slides.

24 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 39 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 17th and January 23rd:

Toolchain fixes James McCoy uploaded subversion/1.9.3-2 which removes -Wdate-time from CPPFLAGS passed to swig enabling several packages to build again. The switch made in binutils/2.25-6 to use deterministic archives by default had the unfortunate effect of breaking a seldom used feature of make. Manoj Srivastava asked on debian-devel the best way to communicate the changes to Debian users. Lunar quickly came up with a patch that displays a warning when Make encounters deterministic archives. Manoj made it available in make/4.1-2 together with a NEWS file advertising the change. Following Guillem Jover's comment on the latest patch to make mtimes of packaged files deterministic, Daniel Kahn Gillmor updated and extended the patch adding the --clamp-mtime option to GNU Tar. Mattia Rizzolo updated texlive-bin in the reproducible experimental repository.

Packages fixed 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 Transition from reproducible.debian.net to the more general tests.reproducible-builds.org has started. More visual changes are coming. (h01ger) A plan on how to run tests for F-Droid has been worked out. (hc, mvdan, h01ger) A first step has been made by adding a Jenkins job to setup an F-Droid build environment. (h01ger)

diffoscope development diffoscope 46 has been released on January 19th, followed-up by version 47 made available on January 23rd. Try it online at try.diffoscope.org! The biggest visible change is the improvement to ELF file handling. Comparisons are now done section by section, using the most appropriate tool and options to get meaningful results, thanks to Dhole's work and Mike Hommey's suggestions. Also suggested by Mike, symbols for IP-relative ops are now filtered out to remove clutter. Understanding differences in ELF files belonging to Debian packages should also be much easier as diffoscope will now try to extract debug information from the matching dbgsym package. This means objdump disassembler should output line numbers for packages built with recent debhelper as long as the associated debug package is in the same directory. As diff tends to consume huge amount of memory on large inputs, diffoscope has a limit in place to prevent crashes. diffoscope used to display a difference every time the limit was hit. Because this was confusing in case there were actually no differences, a hash is now internally computed to only report a difference when one exists. Files in archives and other container members are now compared in the original order. This should not matter in most case but overall give more predictable results. Debian .buildinfo files are now supported. Amongst other minor fixes and improvements, diffoscope will now properly compare symlinks in directories. Thanks Tuomas Tynkkynen for reporting the problem.

Package reviews 70 reviews have been removed, 125 added and 33 updated in the previous week, gcc-5 amongst others. 25 FTBFS issues have been filled by Chris Lamb, Daniel Stender, Martin Michlmayr.

Misc. The 16th FOSDEM will happen in Brussels, Belgium on January 30-31st. Several talks will be about reproducible builds: h01ger about the general ecosystem, Fabian Keil about the security oriented ElectroBSD, Baptiste Daroussin about FreeBSD packages, Ludovic Court s about Guix.

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.

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.

2 November 2015

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: The Debian Administrator s Handbook Updated for Debian 8 Jessie

Debian Handbook: cover of the jessie editionLater than what I hoped, I m still pleased to be able to announce the availability of the Jessie version of the Debian Administrator s Handbook. Check out the official announce with its special launch offer (a 15% discount on the paperback until Sunday!). The book s preface is co-signed by the last three Debian Project Leaders and it has been available through debian.org for a few months now. We are glad to have so much recognition for the hard work we have put in the book over the years. Thank you all and I hope you will enjoy this new edition! The work is not yet entirely over us for Roland and I, since we re now busy updating the French translation of the book. It should be available in the upcoming weeks. Keep posted!

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18 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 25 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote a new patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Pod::Man. This would complement or replace the previously implemented POD_MAN_DATE environment variable in a more generic way. Niko Tyni proposed a fix to prevent mtime variation in directories due to debhelper usage of cp --parents -p. Packages fixed The following 119 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aac-tactics, aafigure, apgdiff, bin-prot, boxbackup, calendar, camlmix, cconv, cdist, cl-asdf, cli-common, cluster-glue, cppo, cvs, esdl, ess, faucc, fauhdlc, fbcat, flex-old, freetennis, ftgl, gap, ghc, git-cola, globus-authz-callout-error, globus-authz, globus-callout, globus-common, globus-ftp-client, globus-ftp-control, globus-gass-cache, globus-gass-copy, globus-gass-transfer, globus-gram-client, globus-gram-job-manager-callout-error, globus-gram-protocol, globus-gridmap-callout-error, globus-gsi-callback, globus-gsi-cert-utils, globus-gsi-credential, globus-gsi-openssl-error, globus-gsi-proxy-core, globus-gsi-proxy-ssl, globus-gsi-sysconfig, globus-gss-assist, globus-gssapi-error, globus-gssapi-gsi, globus-net-manager, globus-openssl-module, globus-rsl, globus-scheduler-event-generator, globus-xio-gridftp-driver, globus-xio-gsi-driver, globus-xio, gnome-control-center, grml2usb, grub, guilt, hgview, htmlcxx, hwloc, imms, kde-l10n, keystone, kimwitu++, kimwitu-doc, kmod, krb5, laby, ledger, libcrypto++, libopendbx, libsyncml, libwps, lprng-doc, madwimax, maria, mediawiki-math, menhir, misery, monotone-viz, morse, mpfr4, obus, ocaml-csv, ocaml-reins, ocamldsort, ocp-indent, openscenegraph, opensp, optcomp, opus, otags, pa-bench, pa-ounit, pa-test, parmap, pcaputils, perl-cross-debian, prooftree, pyfits, pywavelets, pywbem, rpy, signify, siscone, swtchart, tipa, typerep, tyxml, unison2.32.52, unison2.40.102, unison, uuidm, variantslib, zipios++, zlibc, zope-maildrophost. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Packages which could not be tested: 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 that test strings depend on default character encoding of the build system in ongl. reproducible.debian.net The 189 packages composing the Arch Linux core repository are now being tested. No packages are currently reproducible, but most of the time the difference is limited to metadata. This has already gained some interest in the Arch Linux community. An explicit log message is now visible when a build has been killed due to the 12 hours timeout. (h01ger) Remote build setup has been made more robust and self maintenance has been further improved. (h01ger) The minimum age for rescheduling of already tested amd64 packages has been lowered from 14 to 7 days, thanks to the increase of hardware resources sponsored by ProfitBricks last week. (h01ger) diffoscope development diffoscope version 37 has been released on October 15th. It adds support for two new file formats (CBFS images and Debian .dsc files). After proposing the required changes to TLSH, fuzzy hashes are now computed incrementally. This will avoid reading entire files in memory which caused problems for large packages. New tests have been added for the command-line interface. More character encoding issues have been fixed. Malformed md5sums will now be compared as binary files instead of making diffoscope crash amongst several other minor fixes. Version 38 was released two days later to fix the versioned dependency on python3-tlsh. strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.013-1 has been uploaded to the archive. It fixes an issue with nonconformant PNG files with trailing garbage reported by Roland Rosenfeld. disorderfs development disorderfs version 0.4.1-1 is a stop-gap release that will disable lock propagation, unless --share-locks=yes is specified, as it still is affected by unidentified issues. Documentation update Lunar has been busy creating a proper website for reproducible-builds.org that would be a common location for news, documentation, and tools for all free software projects working on reproducible builds. It's not yet ready to be published, but it's surely getting there. Homepage of the future reproducible-builds.org website  Who's involved?  page of the future reproducible-builds.org website Package reviews 103 reviews have been removed, 394 added and 29 updated this week. 72 FTBFS issues were reported by Chris West and Niko Tyni. New issues: random_order_in_static_libraries, random_order_in_md5sums.

27 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 22 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 22 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: breathe, cdi-api, geronimo-jpa-2.0-spec, geronimo-validation-1.0-spec, gradle-propdeps-plugin, jansi, javaparser, libjsr311-api-java, mac-widgets, mockito, mojarra, pastescript, plexus-utils2, powerline, python-psutil, python-sfml, python-tldap, pythondialog, tox, trident, truffle, zookeeper. 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: diffoscope development The changes to make diffoscope run under Python 3, along with many small fixes, entered the archive with version 35 on September 21th. Another release was made the very next day fixed two encoding-related issues discovered when running diffoscope on more Debian packages. strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.12.0 now preserves file permissions on modified zip files and dh_strip_nondeterminism has been made compatible with older debhelper. disorderfs development Version 0.3.0 implemented a multi-user mode that was required to build Debian packages using disorderfs. It also added command line options to control the ordering of files in directory (either shuffled or reversed) and another to do arbitrary changes to the reported space used by files on disk. A couple days later, version 0.4.0 was released to support locks, flush, fsync, fsyncdir, read_buf, and write_buf. Almost all known issues have now been fixed. reproducible.debian.net disorderfs is now used during the second build. This makes file ordering issue very easy to identify as such. (h01ger) Work has been done on making the distributed build setup more reliable. (h01ger) Documentation update Matt Kraii fixed the example on how to fix issues related to dates in Sphinx. Recent Sphinx versions should also be compatible with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Package reviews 53 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 13 updated this week. 46 packages failing to build from source has been identified by Chris Lamb, Chris West, and Niko Tyni. Chris Lamb was the lucky reporter of bug #800000 on vdr-plugin-prefermenu. Issues related to disorderfs are being tracked with a new issue.

21 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 21 in Stretch cycle

If you see someone on the Debian ReproducibleBuilds project, buy him/her a beer. This work is awesome. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Nathan Willis covered our DebConf15 status update in Linux Weekly News. Access to non-LWN subscribers will be given on Thursday 24th. Linux Journal published a more general piece last Tuesday. Unexpected praise for reproducible builds appeared this week in the form of several iOS applications identified as including spyware. The malware was undetected by Apple screening. This actually happened because application developers had simply downloaded a trojaned version of XCode through an unofficial source. While reproducible builds can't really help users of non-free software, this is exactly the kind of attacks that we are trying to prevent in our systems. Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote and uploaded a better patch for the source order problem in libmodule-build-perl. Tristan Seligmann identified how the code generated by python-cffi could be emitted in random order in some cases. Upstream has already fixed the problem. Packages fixed The following 24 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-curator, checkbox-ng, gant, gnome-clocks, hawtjni, jackrabbit, jersey1, libjsr305-java, mathjax-docs, mlpy, moap, octave-geometry, paste, pdf.js, pyinotify, pytango, python-asyncssh, python-mock, python-openid, python-repoze.who, shadow, swift, tcpwatch-httpproxy, transfig. 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 Tests for Coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, and FreeBSD now runs weekly (instead of monthly). diffoscope development Python 3 offers new features (namely yield from and concurrent.futures) that could help implement parallel processing. The clear separation of bytes and unicode strings is also likely to reduce encoding related issues. Mattia Rizolo thus kicked the effort of porting diffoscope to Python 3. tlsh was the only dependency missing a Python 3 module. This got quickly fixed by a new upload. The rest of the code has been moved to the point where only incompatibilities between Python 2.7 and Pyhon 3.4 had to be changed. The commit stream still require some cleanups but all tests are now passing under Python 3. Documentation update The documentation on how to assemble the weekly reports has been updated. (Lunar) The example on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with CMake has been improved. (Ben Beockel, Daniel Kahn Gillmor) The solution for timestamps in man pages generated by Sphinx now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. (Mattia Rizzolo) Package reviews 45 reviews have been removed, 141 added and 62 updated this week. 67 new FTBFS reports have been filled by Chris Lamb, Niko Tyni, and Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer. New issues added this week: randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases, python-ply_compiled_parse_tables. Misc. The prebuilder script is now properly testing umask variations again. Santiago Villa started a discussion on debian-devel on how binNMUs would work for reproducible builds.

1 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 18 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. 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: Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

25 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the  reproducible builds  talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the  reproducible builds  roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

29 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 9 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Norbert Preining uploaded texinfo/6.0.0.dfsg.1-2 which makes texinfo indices reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Lunar submitted recently rebased patches to make the file order of files inside .deb stable. akira filled #789843 to make tex4ht stop printing timestamps in its HTML output by default. Dhole wrote a patch for xutils-dev to prevent timestamps when creating gzip compresed files. Reiner Herrmann sent a follow-up patch for wheel to use UTC as timezone when outputing timestamps. Mattia Rizzolo started a discussion regarding the failure to build from source of subversion when -Wdate-time is added to CPPFLAGS which happens when asking dpkg-buildflags to use the reproducible profile. SWIG errors out because it doesn't recognize the aforementioned flag. Trying to get the .buildinfo specification to more definitive state, Lunar started a discussion on storing the checksums of the binary package used in dpkg status database. akira discovered while proposing a fix for simgrid that CMake internal command to create tarballs would record a timestamp in the gzip header. A way to prevent it is to use the GZIP environment variable to ask gzip not to store timestamps, but this will soon become unsupported. It's up for discussion if the best place to fix the problem would be to fix it for all CMake users at once. Infrastructure-related work Andreas Henriksson did a delayed NMU upload of pbuilder which adds minimal support for build profiles and includes several fixes from Mattia Rizzolo affecting reproducibility tests. Neils Thykier uploaded lintian which both raises the severity of package-contains-timestamped-gzip and avoids false positives for this tag (thanks to Tomasz Buchert). Petter Reinholdtsen filled #789761 suggesting that how-can-i-help should prompt its users about fixing reproducibility issues. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: autorun4linuxcd, libwildmagic, lifelines, plexus-i18n, texlive-base, texlive-extra, texlive-lang. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested uploaded as they are not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: debbindiff development debbindiff/23 includes a few bugfixes by Helmut Grohne that result in a significant speedup (especially on larger files). It used to exhibit the quadratic time string concatenation antipattern. Version 24 was released on June 23rd in a hurry to fix an undefined variable introduced in the previous version. (Reiner Herrmann) debbindiff now has a test suite! It is written using the PyTest framework (thanks Isis Lovecruft for the suggestion). The current focus has been on the comparators, and we are now at 93% of code coverage for these modules. Several problems were identified and fixed in the process: paths appearing in output of javap, readelf, objdump, zipinfo, unsqusahfs; useless MD5 checksum and last modified date in javap output; bad handling of charsets in PO files; the destination path for gzip compressed files not ending in .gz; only metadata of cpio archives were actually compared. stat output was further trimmed to make directory comparison more useful. Having the test suite enabled a refactoring of how comparators were written, switching from a forest of differences to a single tree. This helped removing dust from the oldest parts of the code. Together with some other small changes, version 25 was released on June 27th. A follow up release was made the next day to fix a hole in the test suite and the resulting unidentified leftover from the comparator refactoring. (Lunar) Documentation update Ximin Luo improved code examples for some proposed environment variables for reference timestamps. Dhole added an example on how to fix timestamps C pre-processor macros by adding a way to set the build date externally. akira documented her fix for tex4ht timestamps. Package reviews 94 obsolete reviews have been removed, 330 added and 153 updated this week. Hats off for Chris West (Faux) who investigated many fail to build from source issues and reported the relevant bugs. Slight improvements were made to the scripts for editing the review database, edit-notes and clean-notes. (Mattia Rizzolo) Meetings A meeting was held on June 23rd. Minutes are available. The next meeting will happen on Tuesday 2015-07-07 at 17:00 UTC. Misc. The Linux Foundation announced that it was funding the work of Lunar and h01ger on reproducible builds in Debian and other distributions. This was further relayed in a Bits from Debian blog post.

29 May 2015

Roland Mas: FusionForge 6.0 final release available

Hi all, After 4 release candidates, the FusionForge community is proud to announce the new major Fusionforge 6.0 final release. The major changes in this version are: Here is a more detailed list of visible changes: Standard features: Tracker roadmap of the 6.0 release: roadmap. Some metrics about 6.0: FusionForge 6.0 can be downloaded in source form from our file release system. Packages will be available in some distributions soon. Enjoy! Your feedback to fusionforge-general@lists.fusionforge.org is welcome! For more information on FusionForge, refer to FusionForge.org. -- The FusionForge community

4 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: first week in Stretch cycle

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights: Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.

14 January 2015

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: apt-offline 1.6

I am pleased to announce the release of apt-offline - 1.6 This release is mostly a bug fix release, which every user should upgrade to. It also fixes a major bug in the way we limited the validation of GPG integrity, for the APT repository lists (Thank you Paul Wise). Also, In the last release, we migrated from custom magic library to the python shipped ctype python-magic library. That allowed some bugs to creep, and hopefully now, all those bugs should be fixed. A big thanks to Roland Summers for his bug reports and continuous feedback. What is apt-offline ?
Description-en: offline APT package manager
 apt-offline is an Offline APT Package Manager.
 .
 apt-offline can fully update and upgrade an APT based distribution without
 connecting to the network, all of it transparent to APT.
 .
 apt-offline can be used to generate a signature on a machine (with no network).
 This signature contains all download information required for the APT database
 system. This signature file can be used on another machine connected to the
 internet (which need not be a Debian box and can even be running windows) to
 download the updates.
 The downloaded data will contain all updates in a format understood by APT and
 this data can be used by apt-offline to update the non-networked machine.
 .
 apt-offline can also fetch bug reports and make them available offline.
Debian changelog for the 1.6 release.
apt-offline (1.6) experimental; urgency=medium
  * [2a4a7f1] Don't abuse exception handlers.
    Thanks to R-Sommer
  * [afc51b3] MIME type for a deb package.
    Thanks to R-Sommer
  * [ec2d539] Also include debian-archive-keyring.
    Thanks to Hans-Christoph Steiner (Closes: #748082)
  * [dc602ac] Update MIME type for .gpg
  * [c4f9b71] Cycle through possible apt keyrings.
    Thanks to Paul Wise (Closes: #747163)
  * [de0fe4d] Clarify manpage for install
  * [b5e1075] Update manpage with some doc about argparse positional
    values to arguments
  * [c22d64d] Port is data type integer.
    Thanks to Roland Sommer
  * [67edebe] autodetect release name
  * [5803141] Disable python-apt support
 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>  Wed, 14 Jan 2015 15:34:45 +0530
[1] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/apt-offline/

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26 November 2014

Gunnar Wolf: Guests in the classroom: @Rolman talks about persistent storage and filesystems

On November 14, as a great way to say goodbye to a semester, a good friend came to my class again to present a topic to the group; a good way to sum up the contents of this talk is "everything you ever wondered about persistent storage". As people who follow my blog know, I like inviting my friends to present selected topics in my Operating Systems class. Many subjects will stick better if presented by more than a single viewpoint, and different experiences will surely enrich the group's learning. So, here is Rolando Cedillo A full gigabyte of him, spawning two hours (including two hiccups where my camera hit a per-file limit...). Rolando is currently a RedHat Engineer, and in his long career, he has worked from so many trenches, it would be a crime not to have him! Of course, one day we should do a low-level hardware session with him, as his passion (and deep knowledge) for 8-bit arcades is beyond any other person I have met. So, here is the full video on my server. Alternatively, you can get it from The Internet Archive.

15 May 2014

Thorsten Glaser: Debian packaging example: PHP5 webapp with dbconfig-common and Apache 2.2/2.4 support

I m holding a Debian packaging workshop for our trainees at work tomorrow, and have prepared a sample package for a simple PHP web application (just a handful of files) with DB connection (PostgreSQL of course), automatic setup via dbconfig-common, and with support for both Apache 2.2 (wheezy, precise) and Apache 2.4 (jessie/sid), configuration-wise. (It is possible to install this without Apache, just it does not configure the webserver then.) Schema updates on software updates are also tested (there is neither Flyway nor Liquibase which are the tools we use at work for this, other than Roland Mas wonderful scripts for FusionForge in Debian, but to my delight I discovered that dbconfig-common can also do this). Comments, suggestions, flames, etc. welcome. I know that this should not be a native package, and will address this tomorrow, but I wanted something that serves as decent example for how to do this easily, Policy conformant and using modern techniques (even those I dislike myself for the sake of simplicity). Permission was granted by the business administration to reproduce this all under a BSD-style licence, so, enjoy sharing! Thanks to Roland Mas, for making FusionForge such a nice project, and Arno T ll for some instant IRC help on the Apache side of this. This is my first time using dbconfig-common, and now, I finally feel I know enough to finish the packaging of Kivitendo which I ve started earlier. Beta testers for that welcome, too. (And next week or so, I ll need this for a Maven thingy. I ll probably opt out on the DB side, there, though. Never did anything with that, either, not being a Java guy. I guess something web to go with tomcat7 anyone got this already?)

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