What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 4 and Saturday December 10 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Anders Kaseorg opened a pull request to asciidoc upstream, to make it generate reproducible documentation. (#782294) Bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #847768 filed against hoichess.

Clint Adams:

• #847008 filed against tircd.
• #847021 filed against oolite.
• #847024 filed against torrus.
• #847039 filed against jqueryui.

Dafydd Harries:

• #847033 filed against newlib.
• #847035 filed against bulletml.

Robbie Harwood:

• #846971 filed against maildrop.
• #847009 filed against amanda.

Valerie R Young:

• #846975 filed against libranlip.
• #847016 filed against magicfilter.
• #847020 filed against mailfront.
• #847022 filed against mimefilter.
• #847023 filed against netqmail.
• #847026 filed against psgml.
• #847028 filed against qmail-run.
• #847029 filed against qmail-tools.
• #847030 filed against skalibs.
• #847031 filed against socklog.
• #847032 filed against tinydyndns.
• #847034 filed against twoftpd.
• #847036 filed against ucspi-tcp.
• #847037 filed against ucspi-unix.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 47 package reviews have been added, 84 have been updated and 3 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 new issue type has been added: lessc_captures_build_path Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (8)

diffoscope development Chris Lamb fixed a division-by-zero in the progress bar, split out trydiffoscope into a separate package, and made some performance enhancements. Maria Glukhova fixed build issues with Python 3.4 strip-nondeterminism development Anders Kaseorg added support for .par files, by allowing them to be treated as Zip archives; and Chris Lamb improved some documentation. reprotest development Ximin Luo added the ability to vary the build time using faketime, as well as other code quality improvements and cleanups. He also discovered a little-known fact about faketime - that it also modifies filesystem timestamps by default. He submitted a PR to libfaketime upstream to improve the documentation on this, which was quickly accepted, and also disabled this feature in reprotest's own usage of faketime. buildinfo.debian.net development There was further work on buildinfo.debian.net code. Chris Lamb added support for buildinfo format 0.2 and made rejection notices clearer; and Emanuel Bronshtein fixed some links to use HTTPS. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and via email.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday November 27 and Saturday December 3 2016: Reproducible work in other projects

• Ducible is a new tool to make Windows builds reproducible.
• Manish Goregaokar wrote about Reflections on Rusting Trust.

Media coverage, etc.

• There was a Reproducible Builds hackathon in Boston with contributions from Dafydd, Valerie, Clint, Harlen, Anders, Robbie and Ben. (See the "Bugs filed" section below for the results).
• Distrowatch mentioned Webconverger's reproducible status.

Bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #846588 filed against minicoredumper.
• #846647 filed against tinyeartrainer.
• #846842 filed against nethogs.

Clint Adams:

• #846892 filed against pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring.

Dafydd Harries:

• #846893 filed against flac.

Daniel Shahaf:

• #846832 filed against patat.

Reiner Herrmann:

• #845991 filed against pathogen.

Valerie R Young:

• #846878 filed against taggrepper.
• #846890 filed against ipsvd.
• #846891 filed against integrit.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 15 package reviews have been added, 4 have been updated and 26 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been added:

• nondeterminstic_ordering_in_casacore_tables
• nondeterminstic_output_from_uglifyjs

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

• Chris Lamb (5)
• Lucas Nussbaum (8)
• Santiago Vila (1)

diffoscope development

• diffoscope 63 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo:
  • Greatly improve speed for large archives by fixing O(n^2) complexity for archive member lookup.
  • add +/- buttons to toggle visibility of parts of the diff
  • Output coloured diff using colordiff(1) via --text-color= never,auto,always

Is is available now in Debian, Archlinux and on PyPI. strip-nondeterminism development

• At the Reproducible Builds Boston hackathon Anders Kaseorg filed #846895 treat .par files as Zip archives, including a patch which was merged into master.

reprotest development

• reprotest 0.4 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo:
  • disorderfs variation: don't query the testbed, put that in the script instead
  • Add a build_path_same variation to run builds from the same path
  • Fix auto-presets in the case of a file in the current directory
  • Fix d/control so reprotesting reprotest in sbuild works (6 reproductions)
  • Add util-linux to Recommends since we use it to vary some things

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Holger made a couple of changes:
  • Group all "done" and all "open" usertagged bugs together in the bugs graphs and move the "done bugs" from the bottom of these gaps.
  • Update list of packages installed on .debian.org machines.
  • Made the maintenance jobs run every 2h instead of 3h.
  • Various bug fixes and minor improvements.
• After thorough review by Mattia, some patches by Valerie were merged in preparation of the switch from sqlite to Postgresql, most notably a conversion to the sqlalchemy expression language.
• Holger gave a talk at Profitbricks about how Debian is using 168 cores, 503 GB RAM and 5 TB storage to make jenkins.debian.net and tests.reproducible-builds.org run. Many thanks to Profitbricks for supporting jenkins.debian.net since August 2012!
• Holger created a Jenkins job to build reprotest from git master branch.
• Finally, the Jenkins Naginator plugin was installed to retry git cloning in case of Alioth/network failures, this will benefit all jobs using Git on jenkins.debian.net.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Valerie Young, Vagrant Cascadian, Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

This upload was the first one of my very first package in Debian. It was sponsored by Dafydd Harries, who I ve finally met at DebConf13, and got out of NEW on 2005-08-16. Exactly 8 years ago today. I only realized that yesterday evening, and Debian s birthday feels even more special to me now. Dafydd, it looks like I owe you a lot! :)

I've released version 0.24 of Obnam, my backup application. USER VISIBLE CHANGES

• The way file timestamps (modification and access times) have changed, to fix inaccuracies introduced by the old way. Times are now stored as two integers giving full seconds and nanoseconds past the full second, instead of the weird earlier system that was imposed by Python's use of floating point for the timestamps. This causes the repository format version to be bumped, resulting in a need to start over with an empty repository.
• Extended file attributes are now backed up from and restored to local filesystems. They are neither backed up, nor restored for live data accessed over SFTP.
• If the --exclude regular expression is wrong, Obnam now gives an error message and then ignores the regexp, rather than crashing.
• There is now a compression plugin, enabled with --compress-with=gzip.
• De-duplication mode can now be chosen by the user: the new --deduplicate setting can be one of never (fast, but uses more space); verify (slow, but handles hash collisions gracefully); and fatalist (fast, but lossy, if there is a hash collision). fatalist is the default mode.
• Restores now obey the --dry-run option. Thanks to Peter Palfreder for the bug report.
• New option --verify-randomly allows you to check only a part of the backup, instead of everything.
• Verify now has some progress reporting.
• Forget is now much faster.
• Forget now has progress reporting. It is not fast enough to do without, sorry.
• Backup now removes any checkpoint generations it created during a backup run, if it succeeds without errors.

BUG FIXES:

• Now works with a repository on sshfs. Thanks to Dafydd Harries for reporting the problem.
• Now depends on a newer version of the larch library, fixing a problem when the Obnam default node size changes and an existing repository has a different size.
• User and group names for sftp live data are no longer queried from the local system. Instead, they're marked as unknown.

When it comes to puns about digestion, Dafydd Harries and I make up for in quantity what we lack in quality. Apologies to Daf if he is embarassed by my public acknowledgement of his contributions in this endeavor.

Made it to the “real” Cambridge in one piece. I’m currently in Dafydd Harries and Matthew Garrett’s living room. Last night when we were all sitting around hacking and drinking tea, there were four X-series Thinkpads and four people at the table. Clearly these must be smart people.

My internal clock is finding it hard to believe that it’s light outside right now, which might have something to do with the fact that I’m sitting in Shannon, Ireland. Since I only got maybe two hours of sleep on the plane, I wonder if I’m going to crash horribly later today. I haven’t flown internationally since 2000, so I was a little paranoid about it being a horrible nightmare, but so far it hasn’t been. I haven’t managed to trip any metal detectors yet, though I did accidentally leave my laptop in my bag when I sent it through the scanner at Logan. The security people were nice enough about it, however. I’m not carrying much in terms of carry-ons, so things have been smooth. I completely forgot that “long-haul” flights serve meals. Aer Lingus has a standard meal offering consisting of “chicken” or “beef”, neither of which are very good for vegans. Apparently if you call their reservations office in advance of your flight you can order special meals, of which vegan vegetarian is an option. But I definitely don’t remember this being mentioned at all (or at least very prominently) during the booking process, so I never thought of checking. I had just written off being able to eat the airline food and brought granola bars and snacks. Apparently this was a wrong assumption. I was originally going to FlyGlobespan, but ended up changing my mind after experiencing their entirely broken website which didn’t allow me to make a booking, and waiting a week for a response to their “feedback form” and never getting any, all the while watching their fares creep up as every day passed. Luckily the flight I ended up getting wasn’t too much more expensive, and even allowed me the flexibility to fly into London and out from Glasgow, making it easier to accomplish my plans of visiting Dafydd Harries, Hanna Wallach, and Matthew Garrett in the “other” Cambridge before ending up at Debconf!

It's been more than one year that I'm waiting on NM queue, waiting for an Applicant Manager, performing Philosophy & Procedure part 1 & 2, then Tasks & Skills.

When applying for NM, it's really appreciated to already maintain a few packages in the archive, so for T&S the AM can check them and appreciate the work done. I guess people applying for NM first start by taking care of some package, before submitting.

But for me, it was the opposite way. I joined pkg-xfce team more than 18 months ago, and got my first packages in the archive a few weeks later.

I only applied to NM 6 months later, because, as I was dedicating more time to pkg-xfce, it would be more efficient for me to be able to upload directly, without
bothering huggie or ema (the two DDs in the team). It wasn't really required, but
it interested me, and huggie said me that it'd take some time so the sooner, the better.

Now, due to personal reason, huggie and ema don't have time/motivation anymore to work on pkg-xfce. I'm currently the one in charge, as I spent some time on it, and tries to spent some time on debian-desktop team, so we have a nice and consistent look for desktop environments in Etch. But I can't upload my packages myself, I need to find a sponsor. Xfce represent more than 50 packages (including goodies), that's quite a lot, and we have scripts and procedure to be efficient when rebuilding everything. If I could do everything myself, Xfce 4.4rc2 (released 2006/11/05) would have been in Etch since a long time. But I can't, because I'm stuck in NM queue.

Most of 4.4rc2 packages have been uploaded by my AM, Dafydd Harries (which I want to thank, though), but not everything, and few packages won't be in Etch, now that it's frozen. Yeah, that means that Etch will have half rc1 and half rc2, which isn't really good. Not really bad either, but still... (ok, and not as bad as shipping broken svn snapshots...)

I'm interested in beeing a Debian Developper because I *know* it'll make my work and my time more efficient. And not beeing able to push rc2 to Etch because of that really makes me sad...

Subject: Bug#403129: ITP: 15 December 2006 -- 6b Fair Street                    
                                                                                
Package: wnpp                                                                   
Severity: wishlist                                                              
Owner: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>                                    
                                                                                
* Party name    : Gratuitous party                                              
  Time          : 7:30                                                          
  Maintainers   : Matthew Garrett                                               
                  Dafydd Harries                                                
* Location      : 6b Fair Street                                                
* License       : Bring booze                                                   
  Description   : A party.                                                      
                                                                                
This party aids the transition from pre-Christmas to post-Christmas             
state. It may be safely removed afterwards.