Search Results: "tobi"

3 July 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 61 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 19th and June 25th 2016. Media coverage GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Emil Velikov searched on IRC for hints on how to guarantee unique values during build to invalidate shader caches in Mesa, when also no VCS information is available. A possible solution is a timestamp, which is unique enough for local builds, but can still be reproducible by allowing it to be overwritten with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Packages fixed The following 9 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: cclib librun-parts-perl llvm-toolchain-snapshot python-crypto python-openid r-bioc-shortread r-bioc-variantannotation ruby-hdfeos5 sqlparse The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 139 reviews have been added, 20 have been updated and 21 have been removed in this week. New issues found: 53 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Mateusz ukasik. diffoscope development Quote of the week "My builds are so reproducible, they fail exactly every second time." Johannes Ziemke (@discordianfish) Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb (lamby), Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

30 April 2016

Daniel Stender: What I've worked on for Debian this month

This month I've worked on the following things for Debian: To begin with that, I've set up a Debhelper sequencer script for dh-buildinfo1, this add-on now can be used with dh $@ --with buildinfo in deb/rules instead of having to explicitly call it somewhere in an override. Debops I've set up initial Debian packages of Debops2, a collection of fine crafted Ansible roles and playbooks especially for Debian servers, shipped with a couple of convenience and wrapper scripts in Python3. There are two binary packages, one for the toolset (debops), and the other for the playbooks and roles of the project (debops-playbooks). The application is easy to use, just initialize a new project with debops-init foo and add your server(s) to foo/ansible/inventory/hosts belonging to groups representing services and things you want to employ on them. Like the group [debops_gitlab] automatically installs a complete running Gitlab setup on one or a multitude of servers in the same run with the debops command4. Use other groups like [debops_mariadb_server] accordingly in the same host inventory. Ansible runs agent less, so you don't have to prepare freshly setup servers with nothing special to use that tool randomly (like on localhost). The list of things you could deploy with Debops is quite amazing and you've got dozens of services at your hand. The new packages are currently in experimental because they need some more fine tuning, like there are a couple of minor error messages which recently occur using it, but it works well. The (early staged) documentation unfortunately couldn't be packaged because of the scattered resp. collective nature of the project (all parts have their own Github repositories)5, and also how to generate the upstream tarball remains a bit of a challenge (currently, it's the outcome of debops-init)6. I'll have this package in unstable soon. More info on Debops is coming up, then. Hashicorp's Packer I'm very glad to announce that Packer7 is ready being available in unstable, and the two year old RFP bug could be finally closed8. It's another great and much convenient devops tool which does a lot of different things in an automated fashion using only a single "one-argument" CLI tool in combination with a couple of lines in a configuration script (thanks to Yaroslav Halchenko for the tip). Packer helps creating machine images for different platforms. This is like when you use e.g. Debian installations in a Qemu box for testing or development purposes. Instead of setting up a new virtual machine manually like installing Debian on another computer this process could be automated with Packer, like I've written about in this blog entry here9. You just need a template containing instructions for the included Qemu-builder and a preseeding script for the Debian installer, and there you go drinking your coffee while Packer does all the work for you: downloading the installation ISO image, creating the new virtual harddrive, booting the emulator, running the whole installation process automatically like answering questions, selecting things, rebooting without ISO image to complete the installation etc. A couple of minutes and you have a new pre-baked virtual machine image like from a vendoring machine, a fresh one everytime you need it. Packer10 supports a number of builders for different target platforms (desktop virtualization solutions as much as public cloud providers and private cloud software), can build in parallel, and also the full range of common provisioners can be employed in the process to equip the newly installed OSs. Vagrant boxes could be generated by one of the included postprocessors. I'll write more on Packer here on this blog, soon. There were more then two dozens of packages missing to complete Packer11, which is the achievement of combined forces within the pkg-go group. Much thanks esp. to Alexandre Viau who have worked on the most of the needed new packages. Thanks also to the FTP-masters which were always very quick in reviewing the Go packages, so that it could be proceeded to build and package the sub dependent new ones always consecutively. Squirrel3 I've didn't had the most work with it and just sponsored this for Fabian Wolff, but want to highlight here that there's a new package of Squirrel12 now available in Debian13. Squirrel is a lightweight scripting language, somewhat comparable to Lua. It's fully object-oriented and highly embeddable, it's used in a lot of commerical computer games under the hood for implementing intelligence for bots next to other things14, but also for the Internet of Things (it's embedded in hardware from Electric Imp). Squirrel functions could be called from C++15. I've filed an ITP bug for Squirrel already in 2011 (#651195), but always something else got in the way, and it ended up being an RFP. I'm really glad that it got picked up and completed. misc There were a couple of uploads on updated upstream tarballs and for fixing bugs, namely afl/2.10b-1 and 2.11b-1, python-afl/0.5.3-1, pyutilib/5.3.2-1, pyomo/4.3.11327-1, libvigraimpex/1.10.0+git20160211.167be93dfsg-2 (fix of #820429, thanks for Tobias Frost), and gamera/3.4.2+svn1454-1. For the pkg-go group, I've set up a new package of github-mitchellh-ioprogress (which is needed by the official DigitalOcean CLI tool doctl, now RFP #807956 instead of ITP due to the lack of time - again facing a lot of missing packages), and provided a little patch for dh-make-golang updating some standards16. For Packer I've also updated azure-go-autorest and azure-sdk as team upload (#821938, #821832), but it came out that the project which is currently under heavy development towards a new official release broke a lot in the past weeks (and no Git branching have been used), so that Packer as a matter of fact needed a vendored snapshot, although there have been only a couple of commits in between. Docker-registry hat the same problem with the new package of azure-sdk/2.1.1~beta1, so that it needed to be fixed, too (#822146). By the way, the tool ratt17 comes very handy for automatically test building down all reverse dependencies, not only for Go packages (thanks to Tianon Gravi for the tip). Finally, I've posted the needed reverse depencies as RFP bugs for Terraform18 (again quite a lot), Vuls19, and cve-dictionary20, which is needed for Vuls. I'll let them rest a while waiting to get picked up before working anything down.

Daniel Stender: My work for Debian in April

This month I've worked on the these things for Debian: To begin with that, I've set up a Debhelper sequencer script for dh-buildinfo1, this add-on now can be used with dh $@ --with buildinfo in deb/rules instead of having to explicitly call it somewhere in an override. Debops I've set up initial Debian packages of Debops2, a collection of fine crafted Ansible roles and playbooks especially for Debian servers (servers which run on Debian), which are shipped with a couple of helper and wrapper scripts in Python3. There are two binary packages, one for the toolset (debops), and the other for the playbooks and roles of the project (debops-playbooks). The application is easy to use, just initialize a new project with debops-init foo and add your server(s) to foo/ansible/inventory/hosts belonging to groups representing services and things you want to employ on them. For example, the group [debops_gitlab] automatically installs a complete running Gitlab setup on one or a multitude of servers in the same run with the debops command4. Other groups like [debops_mariadb_server] could be used accordingly in the same host inventory. Ansible works without agent, so you don't have to prepare freshly setup servers with nothing special to use that tool randomly (like on localhost). The list of things you could deploy with Debops is quite amazing and dozens of services are at hand. The new Debian packages are currently in experimental because they need some more fine tuning, e.g. there are a couple of minor error messages which recently occur using it, but it works well. The (early staged) documentation unfortunately couldn't be packaged because of the scattered resp. collective nature of the project (all parts have their own Github repositories)5, and also how to generate the upstream tarball remains a bit of a challenge (currently, it's the outcome of debops-init)6. I'll have this package in unstable soon. More info on Debops is coming up, then. HashiCorp's Packer I'm very glad to announce that Packer7 is ready being available in unstable, and the RFP bug could be finally closed after I've taken it over8. It's another great and much convenient devops tool which does a lot of different things in an automated fashion using only a single "one-argument" CLI tool in combination with a couple of lines in a configuration script (thanks to Yaroslav Halchenko for the tip). Packer helps creating machine images for different platforms. This is like when you use e.g. Debian installations in a Qemu box for testing or development purposes. Instead of setting up a new virtual machine manually the same way as installing Debian on another computer this process can be completely automated with Packer, like I've written about in this blog entry here9. You just need a template which contains instructions for the included Qemu builder and a preseeding script for the Debian installer, and there you go drinking your coffee while Packer does all the work: download the ISO image for installation, create the new virtual harddrive, boot the emulator, run the whole installation process automatically like with answering questions, selecting things, reboot without ISO image to complete the installation etc. A couple of minutes and you have a new pre-baked virtual machine image like from a vendoring machine, another fresh one could be created anytime. Packer10 supports a number of builders for different target platforms (desktop virtualization solutions as much as public cloud providers and private cloud software), can build in parallel, and also the full range of common provisioners can be employed in the process to equip the newly installed OSs with services and programs. Vagrant boxes could be generated by one of the included postprocessors. I'll write more on Packer here on this blog, soon. There were more then two dozens of packages missing to complete Packer11, which is the achievement of combined forces within the pkg-go group. Much thanks esp. to Alexandre Viau who have worked on the most of the needed new packages. Thanks also to the FTP masters which were always very quick in reviewing the Go packages, so that it could be proceeded to build and package the sub dependent new ones always consecutively. Squirrel3 I've didn't had the major work of that and just sponsored this for Fabian Wolff, but want to highlight here that there's a new package of Squirrel12 now available in Debian13. Squirrel is a lightweight scripting language, somewhat comparable to Lua. It's fully object-oriented and highly embeddable, it's used in a lot of commerical computer games under the hood for implementing intelligence for bots next to other things14, but also for the Internet of Things (it's embedded in hardware from Electric Imp). Squirrel functions could be called from C++15. I've filed an ITP bug for Squirrel already in 2011 (#651195), but always something else had a higher priority, and it ended up being an RFP. I'm really glad that it got picked up and completed quickly afterwards. misc There were a couple of uploads on updated upstream tarballs and for fixing bugs, namely afl/2.10b-1 and 2.11b-1, python-afl/0.5.3-1, pyutilib/5.3.2-1, pyomo/4.3.11327-1, libvigraimpex/1.10.0+git20160211.167be93dfsg-2 (fix of #820429, thanks to Tobias Frost), and gamera/3.4.2+svn1454-1. For the pkg-go group, I've set up a new package of github-mitchellh-ioprogress (which is needed by the official DigitalOcean CLI tool doctl, now RFP #807956 instead of ITP due to the lack of time, again a lot of missing packages are missing for that), and provided a little patch for dh-make-golang updating some standards16. For Packer I've also updated azure-go-autorest and azure-sdk as team upload (#821938, #821832), but it came out that the project which is currently under heavy development towards a new official release broke a lot in the past weeks (no Git branching have been used), so that Packer as a matter of fact needed a vendored snapshot, although there have been only a couple of commits in between. Docker-registry has the same problem with the new package of azure-sdk/2.1.1~beta1, so that it needed to be fixed, too (#822146). By the way, the tool ratt17 comes very handy for automatically test building down all reverse dependencies, not only for Go packages (thanks to Tianon Gravi for the tip). Finally, I've posted the needed reverse depencies as RFP bugs for Terraform18 (again quite a lot), Vuls19, and cve-dictionary20, which is needed for Vuls. I'll let them rest a while waiting to get picked up before working anything down.

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.

5 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 44 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 21th and February 27th:

Toolchain fixes Didier Raboud uploaded pyppd/1.0.2-4 which makes PPD generation deterministic. Emmanuel Bourg uploaded plexus-maven-plugin/1.3.8-10 which sorts the components in the components.xml files generated by the plugin. Guillem Jover has implemented stable ordering for members of the control archives in .debs. Chris Lamb submitted another patch to improve reproducibility of files generated by cython.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dctrl-tools, debian-edu, dvdwizard, dymo-cups-drivers, ekg2, epson-inkjet-printer-escpr, expeyes, fades, foomatic-db, galternatives, gnuradio, gpodder, gutenprint icewm, invesalius, jodconverter-cli latex-mk, libiio, libimobiledevice, libmcrypt, libopendbx, lives, lttnganalyses, m2300w, microdc2, navit, po4a, ptouch-driver, pxljr, tasksel, tilda, vdr-plugin-infosatepg, xaos. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

tests.reproducible-builds.org The reproducibly tests for Debian now vary the provider of /bin/sh between bash and dash. (Reiner Herrmann)

diffoscope development diffoscope version 50 was released on February 27th. It adds a new comparator for PostScript files, makes the directory tests pass on slower hardware, and line ordering variations in .deb md5sums files will not be hidden anymore. Version 51 uploaded the next day re-added test data missing from the previous tarball. diffoscope is looking for a new primary maintainer.

Package reviews 87 reviews have been removed, 61 added and 43 updated in the previous week. New issues: captures_shell_variable_in_autofoo_script, varying_ordering_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz. 30 new FTBFS have been reported by Chris Lamb, Antonio Terceiro, Aaron M. Ucko, Michael Tautschnig, and Tobias Frost.

Misc. The release team reported on their discussion about the topic of rebuilding all of Stretch to make it self-contained (in respect to reproducibility). Christian Boltz is hoping someone could talk about reproducible builds at the openSUSE conference happening June 22nd-26th in N rnberg, Germany.

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.

14 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 37 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 3rd and January 9th 2016:

Toolchain fixes David Bremner uploaded dh-elpa/0.0.18 which adds a --fix-autoload-date option (on by default) to take autoload dates from changelog. Lunar updated and sent the patch adding the generation of .buildinfo to dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aggressive-indent-mode, circe, company-mode, db4o, dh-elpa, editorconfig-emacs, expand-region-el, f-el, geiser, hyena, js2-mode, markdown-mode, mono-fuse, mysql-connector-net, openbve, regina-normal, sml-mode, vala-mode-el. 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:
  • #809780 on flask-restful by Chris Lamb: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the build system.
  • #810259 on avfs by Chris Lamb: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the build system.
  • #810509 on apt by Mattia Rizzolo: ensure a stable file order is given to the linker.

reproducible.debian.net Add 2 more armhf build nodes provided by Vagrant Cascadian. This added 7 more armhf builder jobs. We now run around 900 tests of armhf packages each day. (h01ger) The footer of each page now indicates by which Jenkins jobs build it. (h01ger)

diffoscope development diffoscope 45 has been released on January 4th. It features huge memory improvements when comparing large files, several fixes of squashfs related issues that prevented comparing two Tails images, and improve the file list of tar and cpio archive to be more precise and consistent over time. It also fixes a typo that prevented the Mach-O to work (Rainer M ller), improves comparisons of ELF files when specified on the command line, and solves a few more encoding issues.

Package reviews 134 reviews have been removed, 30 added and 37 updated in the previous week. 20 new fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Chris West. prebuilder will now skip installing diffoscope to save time if the build results are identical. (Reiner Herrmann)

7 December 2015

C.J. Adams-Collier: LLC-Technologies-Collier/Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS

Hello dear readers and attendees, This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630. I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame. Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here: https://github.com/LLC-Technologies-Collier/Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS/tree/master To follow along with the presentation, please run these commands or something similar. My development environment is Debian stable. So yes, this means that we re not doing a demo of the state of the art. But it also means that the infrastructure has been exercised under load and in production. Install Debian package dependencies First, install the debian packages of nodejs and npm, the node package manager:
cjac@debian0:~$ sudo apt-get install nodejs nodejs-dev nodejs-legacy npm
Check out the git repository After this, check out the repository from github and create a branch for your work:
cjac@debian0:~$ mkdir -p /usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier
cjac@debian0:~$ cd /usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier
cjac@debian0:/usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier$ git clone git@github.com:LLC-Technologies-Collier/Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS.git
...
cjac@debian0:/usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier$ cd Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ git checkout -b $USER
Upgrade to latest npm, install deps Once we have the git repository checked out, we ll grab the latest version of npm and the rest of the node modules
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ export PATH="$PWD/node_modules/.bin:$PATH"
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ npm install --save-exact npm@"2.1.0"
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ npm install --save-exact  cat pkgackage-list.txt 
This post and the associated git repository will be updated between now and the presentation on Thursday. Please chime in and feel free to get involved! C.J.

2 December 2015

Andrea Veri: Three years and counting

It s been a while since my last what s been happening behind the scenes e-mail so I m here to report on what has been happening within the GNOME Infrastructure, its future plans and my personal sensations about a challenge that started around three (3) years ago when Sriram Ramkrishna and Jeff Schroeder proposed my name as a possible candidate for coordinating the team that runs the systems behind the GNOME Project. All this followed by the official hiring achieved by Karen Sandler back in February 2013. The GNOME Infrastructure has finally reached stability both in terms of reliability and uptime, we didn t have any service disruption this and the past year and services have been running smoothly as they were expected to in a project like the one we are managing. As many of you know service disruptions and a total lack of maintenance were very common before I joined back in 2013, I m so glad the situation has dramatically changed and developers, users, passionates are now able to reach our websites, code repositories, build machines without experiencing slowness, downtimes or
unreachability. Additionally all these groups of people now have a reference point they can contact in case they need help when coping with the infrastructure they daily use. The ticketing system allows users to get in touch with the members of the Sysadmin Team and receive support right away within a very short period of time (Also thanks to Pagerduty, service the Foundation is kindly sponsoring) Before moving ahead to the future plans I d like to provide you a summary of what has been done during these roughly three years so you can get an idea of why I define the changes that happened to the infrastructure a complete revamp:
  1. Recycled several ancient machines migrating services off of them while consolidating them by placing all their configuration on our central configuration management platform ran by Puppet. This includes a grand total of 7 machines that were replaced by new hardware and extended warranties the Foundation kindly sponsored.
  2. We strenghten our websites security by introducing SSL certificates everywhere and recently replacing them with SHA2 certificates.
  3. We introduced several services such as Owncloud, the Commits Bot, the Pastebin, the Etherpad, Jabber, the GNOME Github mirror.
  4. We restructured the way we backup our machines also thanks to the Fedora Project sponsoring the disk space on their backup facility. The way we were used to handle backups drastically changed from early years where a magnetic tape facility was in charge of all the burden of archiving our data to today where a NetApp is used together with rdiff-backup.
  5. We upgraded Bugzilla to the latest release, a huge thanks goes to Krzesimir Nowak who kindly helped us building the migration tools.
  6. We introduced the GNOME Apprentice program open-sourcing our internal Puppet repository and cleansing it (shallow clones FTW!) from any sensitive information which now lives on a different repository with restricted access.
  7. We retired Mango and our OpenLDAP instance in favor of FreeIPA which allows users to modify their account information on their own without waiting for the Accounts Team to process the change.
  8. We documented how our internal tools are customized to play together making it easy for future Sysadmin Team members to learn how the infrastructure works and supersede existing members in case they aren t able to keep up their position anymore.
  9. We started providing hosting to the GIMP and GTK projects which now completely rely on the GNOME Infrastructure. (DNS, email, websites and other services infrastructure hosting)
  10. We started providing hosting not only to the GIMP and GTK projects but to localized communities as well such as GNOME Hispano and GNOME Greece
  11. We configured proper monitoring for all the hosted services thanks to Nagios and Check-MK
  12. We migrated the IRC network to a newer ircd with proper IRC services (Nickserv, Chanserv) in place.
  13. We made sure each machine had a configured management (mgmt) and KVM interface for direct remote access to the bare metal machine itself, its hardware status and all the operations related to it. (hard reset, reboot, shutdown etc.)
  14. We upgraded MoinMoin to the latest release and made a substantial cleanup of old accounts, pages marked as spam and trashed pages.
  15. We deployed DNSSEC for several domains we manage including gnome.org, guadec.es, gnomehispano.es, guadec.org, gtk.org and gimp.org
  16. We introduced an account de-activation policy which comes into play when a contributor not committing to any of the hosted repositories at git.gnome.org since two years is caught by the script. The account in question is marked as inactive and the gnomecvs (from the old cvs days) and ftpadmin groups are removed.
  17. We planned mass reboots of all the machines roughly every month for properly applying security and kernel updates.
  18. We introduced Mirrorbrain (MB), the mirroring service serving GNOME and related modules tarballs and software all over the world. Before introducing MB GNOME had several mirrors located in all the main continents and at the same time a very low amount of users making good use of them. Many organizations and companies behind these mirrors decided to not host GNOME sources anymore as the statistics of usage were very poor and preferred providing the same service to projects that really had a demand for these resources. MB solved all this allowing a proper redirect to the closest mirror (through mod_geoip) and making sure the sources checksum matched across all the mirrors and against the original tarball uploaded by a GNOME maintainer and hosted at master.gnome.org.
I can keep the list going for dozens of other accomplished tasks but I m sure many of you are now more interested in what the future plans actually are in terms of where the GNOME Infrastructure should be in the next couple of years. One of the main topics we ve been discussing will be migrating our Git infrastructure away from cgit (which is mainly serving as a code browsing tool) to a more complete platform that is surely going to include a code review tool of some sort. (Gerrit, Gitlab, Phabricator) Another topic would be migrating our mailing lists to Mailman 3 / Hyperkitty. This also means we definitely need a staging infrastructure in place for testing these kind of transitions ideally bound to a separate Puppet / Ansible repository or branch. Having a different repository for testing purposes will also mean helping apprentices to test their changes directly on a live system and not on their personal computer which might be running a different OS / set of tools than the ones we run on the GNOME Infrastructure. What I also aim would be seeing GNOME Accounts being the only authentication resource in use within the whole GNOME Infrastructure. That means one should be able to login to a specific service with the same username / password in use on the other hosted services. That s been on my todo list for a while already and it s probably time to push it forward together with Patrick Uiterwijk, responsible of Ipsilon s development at Red Hat and GNOME Sysadmin. While these are the top priority items we are soon receiving new hardware (plus extended warranty renewals for two out of the three machines that had their warranty renewed a while back) and migrating some of the VMs off from the current set of machines to the new boxes is definitely another task I d be willing to look at in the next couple of months (one machine (ns-master.gnome.org) is being decommissioned giving me a chance to migrate away from BIND into NSD). The GNOME Infrastructure is evolving and it s crucial to have someone maintaining it. On this side I m bringing to your attention the fact the assigned Sysadmin funds are running out as reported on the Board minutes from the 27th of October. On this side Jeff Fortin started looking for possible sponsors and came up with the idea of making a brochure with a set of accomplished tasks that couldn t have been possible without the Sysadmin fundraising campaign launched by Stormy Peters back in June 2010 being a success. The Board is well aware of the importance of having someone looking at the infrastructure that runs the GNOME Project and is making sure the brochure will be properly reviewed and published. And now some stats taken from the Puppet Git Repository:
$ cd /git/GNOME/puppet && git shortlog -ns
3520 Andrea Veri
506 Olav Vitters
338 Owen W. Taylor
239 Patrick Uiterwijk
112 Jeff Schroeder
71 Christer Edwards
4 Daniel Mustieles
4 Matanya Moses
3 Tobias Mueller
2 John Carr
2 Ray Wang
1 Daniel Mustieles Garc a
1 Peter Baumgarten
and from the Request Tracker database (52388 being my assigned ID):
mysql> select count(*) from Tickets where LastUpdatedBy = '52388';
+----------+
  count(*)  
+----------+
  3613  
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from Tickets where LastUpdatedBy = '52388' and Status = 'Resolved';
+----------+
  count(*)  
+----------+
  1596  
+----------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)
It s been a long run which made me proud, for the things I learnt, for the tasks I ve been able to accomplish, for the great support the GNOME community gave me all the time and most of all for the same fact of being part of the team responsible of the systems hosting the GNOME Project. Thank you GNOME community for your continued and never ending backing, we daily work to improve how the services we host are delivered to you and the support we receive back is fundamental for our passion and enthusiasm to remain high!

23 November 2015

C.J. Adams-Collier: Regarding fdupes

Dear readers, There is a very useful tool for finding and merging shared permanent storage, and its name is fdupes. There was a terrible occurrence in the software after version 1.51, however. They removed the -L argument because too many people were complaining about lost data. It sounds like user error to me, and so I continue to use this one. I have to build from source, since the newer versions do not have the -L option. https://github.com/tobiasschulz/fdupes And so there you are. I recommend using it, even though this most useful feature has been deprecated and removed from the software. Perhaps there should be a fdupes-danger package in Debian?

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.

14 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 24 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Scott Kitterman fixed an issue with non-deterministic Depends generated by dh-python identified by Santiago Vila and Chris Lamb. Lunar updated the patch against dpkg which makes the order of files in control.tar.gz deterministic using the new --sort=name option available in GNU Tar 1.28. josch released sbuild version 0.66.0-1 with several fixes and improvements. The most notable one for reproducible builds is the new --build-path option and $build_path configuration variable added by akira which allows to explicitly chose a given build path. Reiner Herrmann wrote a new patch for dh-systemd to sort the list of unit files in the generated maintainer scripts. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aoeui, apron, camlmix, cudf, findlib, glpk-java, hawtjni, haxe, java-atk-wrapper, llvm-py, misery, mtasc, ocamldsort, optcomp, spamoracle. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net ProfitBricks once again increased their support for reproducible builds in Debian and in other free software projects by adding 58 new cores and 138 GiB of RAM to the already existing setup. Two new amd64 build nodes and 16 new amd64 build jobs have been added which doubles the build capacity per day and allows us to spot many kind of problems earlier. The size of the tmpfs where builds are performed has also been increased from 70 to 200 GiB on all amd64 build nodes. Huge thanks! When examining a package, a link now points to a table listing all previous recorded tests for the same package. (Mattia) The menu on the package pages has also been improved. (h01ger) Packages in the depwait state are now rescheduled automatically after five days. (h01ger) Links to documentation and other projects being tested have been made more visible on the landing page. (h01ger) To reduce noise on the team IRC channel five different types of notifications have been turned into mail notifications. The remaining ones have been shortened and the status changes have been limited to unstable and experimental. (h01ger) Maintainer notifications about status changes in a package will only be sent out once per day, and not on each status change. (h01ger) diffoscope development Some more experiments of concurrent processing have been made. None were good and reliable enough to be shared, though. Package reviews 48 reviews have been removed, 189 added and 23 updated this week. 9 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger met with Levente Polyak to discuss testing Arch Linux on Debian continuous test system with an easily extensible framework. The idea is to also allow testing of other distributions, and provide a nice package based view like the one for Debian.

4 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 23 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Andreas Metzler uploaded autogen/1:5.18.6-1 in experimental with several patches for reproducibility issues written by Valentin Lorentz. Groovy upstream has merged a change proposed by Emmanuel Bourg to remove timestamps generated by groovydoc. Ben Hutchings submitted a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in linux-kbuild as an alternate way to specify the build timestamp. Reiner Herrman has sent a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in docbook-utils. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: commons-csv. fest-reflect, sunxi-tools, xfce4-terminal, 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: Tomasz Rybak uploaded pycuda/2015.1.3-1 which should fix reproducibility issues. The package has not been tested as it is in contrib. akira found an embedded code copy of texi2html in fftw. reproducible.debian.net Email notifications are now only sent once a day per package, instead of on each status change. (h01ger) disorderfs has been temporarily disabled to see if it had any impact on the disk space issues. (h01ger) When running out of disk space, build nodes will now automatically detect the problem. This means test results will not be recorded as FTBFS and the problem will be reported to Jenkins maintainers. (h01ger) The navigation menu of package pages has been improved. (h01ger) The two amd64 builders now use two different kernel versions: 3.16 from stable and 4.1 from backports on the other. (h01ger) We now graph the number of packages which needs to be fixed. (h01ger) Munin now creates graphs on how many builds were performed by build nodes (example). (h01ger) A migration plan has been agreed with DSA on how to turn Jenkins into an official Debian service. A backport of jenkins-job-builder for Jessie is currently missing. (h01ger) Package reviews 119 reviews have been removed, 103 added and 45 updated this week. 16 fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Mattia Rizzolo. New issue this week: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_docbook_utils. Misc. Allan McRae has submitted a patch to make ArchLinux pacman record a .BUILDINFO file.

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.

24 September 2015

Joachim Breitner: The Incredible Proof Machine

In a few weeks, I will have the opportunity to offer a weekend workshop to selected and motivated high school students1 to a topic of my choice. My idea is to tell them something about logic, proofs, and the joy of searching and finding proofs, and the gratification of irrevocable truths. While proving things on paper is already quite nice, it is much more fun to use an interactive theorem prover, such as Isabelle, Coq or Agda: You get immediate feedback, you can experiment and play around if you are stuck, and you get lots of small successes. Someone2 once called interactive theorem proving the worlds most geekiest videogame . Unfortunately, I don t think one can get high school students without any prior knowledge in logic, or programming, or fancy mathematical symbols, to do something meaningful with a system like Isabelle, so I need something that is (much) easier to use. I always had this idea in the back of my head that proving is not so much about writing text (as in normally written proofs) or programs (as in Agda) or labeled statements (as in Hilbert-style proofs), but rather something involving facts that I have proven so far floating around freely, and way to combine these facts to new facts, without the need to name them, or put them in a particular order or sequence. In a way, I m looking for labVIEW wrestled through the Curry-Horward-isomorphism. Something like this:
A proof of implication currying

A proof of implication currying

So I set out, rounded up a few contributors (Thanks!), implemented this, and now I proudly present: The Incredible Proof Machine3 This interactive theorem prover allows you to do perform proofs purely by dragging blocks (representing proof steps) onto the paper and connecting them properly. There is no need to learn syntax, and hence no frustration about getting that wrong. Furthermore, it comes with a number of example tasks to experiment with, so you can simply see it as a challenging computer came and work through them one by one, learning something about the logical connectives and how they work as you go. For the actual workshop, my plan is to let the students first try to solve the tasks of one session on their own, let them draw their own conclusions and come up with an idea of what they just did, and then deliver an explanation of the logical meaning of what they did. The implementation is heavily influenced by Isabelle: The software does not know anything about, say, conjunction ( ) and implication ( ). To the core, everything is but an untyped lambda expression, and when two blocks are connected, it does unification4 of the proposition present on either side. This general framework is then instantiated by specifying the basic rules (or axioms) in a descriptive manner. It is quite feasible to implement other logics or formal systems on top of this as well. Another influence of Isabelle is the non-linear editing: You neither have to create the proof in a particular order nor have to manually manage a proof focus . Instead, you can edit any bit of the proof at any time, and the system checks all of it continuously. As always, I am keen on feedback. Also, if you want to use this for your own teaching or experimenting needs, let me know. We have a mailing list for the project, the code is on GitHub, where you can also file bug reports and feature requests. Contributions are welcome! All aspects of the logic are implemented in Haskell and compiled to JavaScript using GHCJS, the UI is plain hand-written and messy JavaScript code, using JointJS to handle the graph interaction. Obviously, there is still plenty that can be done to improve the machine. In particular, the ability to create your own proof blocks, such as proof by contradiction, prove them to be valid and then use them in further proofs, is currently being worked on. And while the page will store your current progress, including all proofs you create, in your browser, it needs better ways to save, load and share tasks, blocks and proofs. Also, we d like to add some gamification, i.e. achievements ( First proof by contradiction , 50 theorems proven ), statistics, maybe a share theorem on twitter button. As the UI becomes more complicated, I d like to investigating moving more of it into Haskell world and use Functional Reactive Programming, i.e. Ryan Trickle s reflex, to stay sane. Customers who liked The Incredible Proof Machine might also like these artifacts, that I found while looking whether something like this exists:

  1. Students with migration background supported by the START scholarship
  2. Does anyone know the reference?
  3. We almost named it Proofcraft , which would be a name our current Minecraft-wild youth would appreciate, but it is alreay taken by Gerwin Kleins blog. Also, the irony of a theorem prover being in-credible is worth something.
  4. Luckily, two decades ago, Tobias Nipkow published a nice implementation of higher order pattern unification as ML code, which I transliterated to Haskell for this project.

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!

26 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 12 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Eric Dorlan uploaded automake-1.15/1:1.15-2 which makes the output of mdate-sh deterministic. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-8 which now honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to dh-python to make the order of the generated maintainer scripts deterministic. Chris also offered a fix for a source of non-determinism in dpkg-shlibdeps when packages have alternative dependencies. Dhole provided a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to gettext. Packages fixed The following 78 packages became reproducible in our setup due to changes in their build dependencies: chemical-mime-data, clojure-contrib, cobertura-maven-plugin, cpm, davical, debian-security-support, dfc, diction, dvdwizard, galternatives, gentlyweb-utils, gifticlib, gmtkbabel, gnuplot-mode, gplanarity, gpodder, gtg-trace, gyoto, highlight.js, htp, ibus-table, impressive, jags, jansi-native, jnr-constants, jthread, jwm, khronos-api, latex-coffee-stains, latex-make, latex2rtf, latexdiff, libcrcutil, libdc0, libdc1394-22, libidn2-0, libint, libjava-jdbc-clojure, libkryo-java, libphone-ui-shr, libpicocontainer-java, libraw1394, librostlab-blast, librostlab, libshevek, libstxxl, libtools-logging-clojure, libtools-macro-clojure, litl, londonlaw, ltsp, macsyfinder, mapnik, maven-compiler-plugin, mc, microdc2, miniupnpd, monajat, navit, pdmenu, pirl, plm, scikit-learn, snp-sites, sra-sdk, sunpinyin, tilda, vdr-plugin-dvd, vdr-plugin-epgsearch, vdr-plugin-remote, vdr-plugin-spider, vdr-plugin-streamdev, vdr-plugin-sudoku, vdr-plugin-xineliboutput, veromix, voxbo, xaos, xbae. 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 The statistics on the main page of reproducible.debian.net are now updated every five minutes. A random unreviewed package is suggested in the look at a package form on every build. (h01ger) A new package set based new on the Core Internet Infrastructure census has been added. (h01ger) Testing of FreeBSD has started, though no results yet. More details have been posted to the freebsd-hackers mailing list. The build is run on a new virtual machine running FreeBSD 10.1 with 3 cores and 6 GB of RAM, also sponsored by Profitbricks. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released version 0.009 of strip-nondeterminism. The new version will strip locales from Javadoc, include the name of files causing errors, and ignore unhandled (but rare) zip64 archives. debbindiff development Lunar continued its major refactoring to enhance code reuse and pave the way to fuzzy-matching and parallel processing. Most file comparators have now been converted to the new class hierarchy. In order to support for archive formats, work has started on packaging Python bindings for libarchive. While getting support for more archive formats with a common interface is very nice, libarchive is a stream oriented library and might have bad performance with how debbindiff currently works. Time will tell if better solutions need to be found. Documentation update Lunar started a Reproducible builds HOWTO intended to explain the different aspects of making software build reproducibly to the different audiences that might have to get involved like software authors, producers of binary packages, and distributors. Package reviews 17 obsolete reviews have been removed, 212 added and 46 updated this week. 15 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and Mattia Rizzolo. Presentations Lunar presented Debian efforts and some recipes on making software build reproducibly at Libre Software Meeting 2015. Slides and a video recording are available. Misc. h01ger, dkg, and Lunar attended a Core Infrastructure Initiative meeting. The progress and tools mode for the Debian efforts were shown. Several discussions also helped getting a better understanding of the needs of other free software projects regarding reproducible builds. The idea of a global append only log, similar to the logs used for Certificate Transparency, came up on multiple occasions. Using such append only logs for keeping records of sources and build results has gotten the name Binary Transparency Logs . They would at least help identifying a compromised software signing key. Whether the benefits in using such logs justify the costs need more research.

22 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 8 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Andreas Henriksson has improved Johannes Schauer initial patch for pbuilder adding support for build profiles. Packages fixed The following 12 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: collabtive, eric, file-rc, form-history-control, freehep-chartableconverter-plugin , jenkins-winstone, junit, librelaxng-datatype-java, libwildmagic, lightbeam, puppet-lint, tabble. 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 Bugs with the ftbfs usertag are now visible on the bug graphs. This explain the recent spike. (h01ger) Andreas Beckmann suggested a way to test building packages using the funny paths that one can get when they contain the full Debian package version string. debbindiff development Lunar started an important refactoring introducing abstactions for containers and files in order to make file type identification more flexible, enabling fuzzy matching, and allowing parallel processing. Documentation update Ximin Luo detailed the proposal to standardize environment variables to pass a reference source date to tools that needs one (e.g. documentation generator). Package reviews 41 obsolete reviews have been removed, 168 added and 36 updated this week. Some more issues affecting packages failing to build from source have been identified. Meetings Minutes have been posted for Tuesday June 16th meeting. The next meeting is scheduled Tuesday June 23rd at 17:00 UTC. Presentations Lunar presented the project in French during Pas Sage en Seine in Paris. Video and slides are available.

22 December 2014

Michael Prokop: Ten years of Grml

* On 22nd of October 2004 an event called OS04 took place in Seifenfabrik Graz/Austria and it marked the first official release of the Grml project. Grml was initially started by myself in 2003 I registered the domain on September 16, 2003 (so technically it would be 11 years already :)). It started with a boot-disk, first created by hand and then based on yard. On 4th of October 2004 we had a first presentation of grml 0.09 Codename Bughunter at Kunstlabor in Graz. I managed to talk a good friend and fellow student Martin Hecher into joining me. Soon after Michael Gebetsroither and Andreas Gredler joined and throughout the upcoming years further team members (Nico Golde, Daniel K. Gebhart, Mario Lang, Gerfried Fuchs, Matthias Kopfermann, Wolfgang Scheicher, Julius Plenz, Tobias Klauser, Marcel Wichern, Alexander Wirt, Timo Boettcher, Ulrich Dangel, Frank Terbeck, Alexander Steinb ck, Christian Hofstaedtler) and contributors (Hermann Thomas, Andreas Krennmair, Sven Guckes, Jogi Hofm ller, Moritz Augsburger, ) joined our efforts. Back in those days most efforts went into hardware detection, loading and setting up the according drivers and configurations, packaging software and fighting bugs with lots of reboots (working on our custom /linuxrc for the initrd wasn t always fun). Throughout the years virtualization became more broadly available, which is especially great for most of the testing you need to do when working on your own (meta) distribution. Once upon a time udev became available and solved most of the hardware detection issues for us. Nowadays X.org doesn t even need a xorg.conf file anymore (at least by default). We have to acknowledge that Linux grew up over the years quite a bit (and I m wondering how we ll look back at the systemd discussions in a few years). By having Debian Developers within the team we managed to push quite some work of us back to Debian (the distribution Grml was and still is based on), years before the Debian Derivatives initiative appeared. We never stopped contributing to Debian though and we also still benefit from the Debian Derivatives initiative, like sharing issues and ideas on DebConf meetings. On 28th of May 2009 I myself became an official Debian Developer. Over the years we moved from private self-hosted infrastructure to company-sponsored systems, migrated from Subversion (brr) to Mercurial (2006) to Git (2008). Our Zsh-related work became widely known as grml-zshrc. jenkins.grml.org managed to become a continuous integration/deployment/delivery home e.g. for the dpkg, fai, initramfs-tools, screen and zsh Debian packages. The underlying software for creating Debian packages in a CI/CD way became its own project known as jenkins-debian-glue in August 2011. In 2006 I started grml-debootstrap, which grew into a reliable method for installing plain Debian (nowadays even supporting installation as VM, and one of my customers does tens of deployments per day with grml-debootstrap in a fully automated fashion). So one of the biggest achievements of Grml is from my point of view that it managed to grow several active and successful sub-projects under its umbrella. Nowadays the Grml team consists of 3 Debian Developers Alexander Wirt (formorer), Evgeni Golov (Zhenech) and myself. We couldn t talk Frank Terbeck (ft) into becoming a DM/DD (yet?), but he s an active part of our Grml team nonetheless and does a terrific job with maintaining grml-zshrc as well as helping out in Debian s Zsh packaging (and being a Zsh upstream committer at the same time makes all of that even better :)). My personal conclusion for 10 years of Grml? Back in the days when I was a student Grml was my main personal pet and hobby. Grml grew into an open source project which wasn t known just in Graz/Austria, but especially throughout the German system administration scene. Since 2008 I m working self-employed and mainly working on open source stuff, so I m kind of living a dream, which I didn t even have when I started with Grml in 2003. Nowadays with running my own business and having my own family it s getting harder for me to consider it still a hobby though, instead it s more integrated and part of my business which I personally consider both good and bad at the same time (for various reasons). Thanks so much to anyone of you, who was (and possibly still is) part of the Grml journey! Let s hope for another 10 successful years! Thanks to Max Amanshauser and Christian Hofstaedtler for reading drafts of this.

28 April 2014

Evgeni Golov: Debian Bug Squashing Party Salzburg 2014

bsp2014_small This weekend, Bernd Zeimetz organized a BSP at the offices of conova in Salzburg, Austria. Three days of discussions, bugfixes, sparc removals and a lot of fun and laughter. We squashed a total of 87 bugs: 66 bugs affecting Jessie/Sid were closed, 9 downgraded and 8 closed via removals. As people tend to care about (old)stable, 3 bugs were fixed in Wheezy and one in Squeeze. These numbers might be not totaly correct, as were kinda creative at counting Marga promised a talk about an introduction to properly counting bugs using the Haus vom Nikolaus algorithm to the base of 7 . IMG_20140427_182902 Speaking of numbers, I touched the following bugs (not all RC): A couple of (non-free) pictures are available at Uwe s salzburg-cityguide.at. Thanks again to Bernd for organizing and conova and credativ for sponsoring!

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