Search Results: "Dmitry Shachnev"

5 December 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2024

Welcome to the November 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the world of software supply-chain security where relevant. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar
  2. Introducing reproduce.debian.net
  3. New landing page design
  4. SBOMs for Python packages
  5. Debian updates
  6. Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4
  7. PyPI now supports digital attestations
  8. Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries
  9. Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible
  10. Website updates
  11. Upstream patches
  12. Misc development news
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar The Reproducible Builds community sadly announced it has lost its founding member, Lunar. J r my Bobbio aka Lunar passed away on Friday November 8th in palliative care in Rennes, France. Lunar was instrumental in starting the Reproducible Builds project in 2013 as a loose initiative within the Debian project. He was the author of our earliest status reports and many of our key tools in use today are based on his design. Lunar s creativity, insight and kindness were often noted. You can view our full tribute elsewhere on our website. He will be greatly missed.

Introducing reproduce.debian.net In happier news, this month saw the introduction of reproduce.debian.net. Announced at the recent Debian MiniDebConf in Toulouse, reproduce.debian.net is an instance of rebuilderd operated by the Reproducible Builds project. rebuilderd is our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempts to reproduce the observed results there. In November, reproduce.debian.net began rebuilding Debian unstable on the amd64 architecture, but throughout the MiniDebConf, it had attempted to rebuild 66% of the official archive. From this, it could be determined that it is currently possible to bit-for-bit reproduce and corroborate approximately 78% of the actual binaries distributed by Debian that is, using the .buildinfo files hosted by Debian itself. reproduce.debian.net also contains instructions how to setup one s own rebuilderd instance, and we very much invite everyone with a machine to spare to setup their own version and to share the results. Whilst rebuilderd is still in development, it has been used to reproduce Arch Linux since 2019. We are especially looking for installations targeting Debian architectures other than i386 and amd64.

New landing page design As part of a very productive partnership with the Sovereign Tech Fund and Neighbourhoodie, we are pleased to unveil our new homepage/landing page. We are very happy with our collaboration with both STF and Neighbourhoodie (including many changes not directly related to the website), and look forward to working with them in the future.

SBOMs for Python packages The Python Software Foundation has announced a new cross-functional project for SBOMs and Python packages . Seth Michael Larson writes that the project is specifically looking to solve these issues :
  • Enable Python users that require SBOM documents (likely due to regulations like CRA or SSDF) to self-serve using existing SBOM generation tools.
  • Solve the phantom dependency problem, where non-Python software is bundled in Python packages but not recorded in any metadata. This makes the job of software composition analysis (SCA) tools difficult or impossible.
  • Make the adoption work by relevant projects such as build backends, auditwheel-esque tools, as minimal as possible. Empower users who are interested in having better SBOM data for the Python projects they are using to be able to contribute engineering time towards that goal.
A GitHub repository for the initiative is available, and there are a number of queries, comments and remarks on Seth s Discourse forum post.

Debian updates There was significant development within Debian this month. Firstly, at the recent MiniDebConf in Toulouse, France, Holger Levsen gave a Debian-specific talk on rebuilding packages distributed from ftp.debian.org that is to say, how to reproduce the results from the official Debian build servers: Holger described the talk as follows:
For more than ten years, the Reproducible Builds project has worked towards reproducible builds of many projects, and for ten years now we have build Debian packages twice with maximal variations applied to see if they can be build reproducible still. Since about a month, we ve also been rebuilding trying to exactly match the builds being distributed via ftp.debian.org. This talk will describe the setup and the lessons learned so far, and why the results currently are what they are (spoiler: they are less than 30% reproducible), and what we can do to fix that.
The Debian Project Leader, Andreas Tille, was present at the talk and remarked later in his Bits from the DPL update that:
It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I d like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar s contributions and legacy. Personally, I ve encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work.
Holger s slides and video in .webm format are available.
Next, rebuilderd is the server to monitor package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results. This month, version 0.21.0 released, most notably with improved support for binNMUs by Jochen Sprickerhof and updating the rebuilderd-debian.sh integration to the latest debrebuild version by Holger Levsen. There has also been significant work to get the rebuilderd package into the Debian archive, in particular, both rust-rebuilderd-common version 0.20.0-1 and rust-rust-lzma version 0.6.0-1 were packaged by kpcyrd and uploaded by Holger Levsen. Related to this, Holger Levsen submitted three additional issues against rebuilderd as well:
  • rebuildctl should be more verbose when encountering issues. [ ]
  • Please add an option to used randomised queues. [ ]
  • Scheduling and re-scheduling multiple packages at once. [ ]
and lastly, Jochen Sprickerhof submitted one an issue requested that rebuilderd downloads the source package in addition to the .buildinfo file [ ] and kpcyrd also submitted and fixed an issue surrounding dependencies and clarifying the license [ ]
Separate to this, back in 2018, Chris Lamb filed a bug report against the sphinx-gallery package as it generates unreproducible content in various ways. This month, however, Dmitry Shachnev finally closed the bug, listing the multiple sub-issues that were part of the problem and how they were resolved.
Elsewhere, Roland Clobus posted to our mailing list this month, asking for input on a bug in Debian s ca-certificates-java package. The issue is that the Java key management tools embed timestamps in its output, and this output ends up in the /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts file on the generated ISO images. A discussion resulted from Roland s post suggesting some short- and medium-term solutions to the problem.
Holger Levsen uploaded some packages with reproducibility-related changes:
Lastly, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 5 were updated and 21 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues in Debian.

Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4 On our mailing list this month, Herv Boutemy reported the latest release of Maven (4.0.0-beta-5) has reproducible builds enabled by default. In his mailing list post, Herv mentions that this story started during our Reproducible Builds summit in Hamburg , where he created the upstream issue that builds on a multi-year effort to have Maven builds configured for reproducibility.

PyPI now supports digital attestations Elsewhere in the Python ecosystem and as reported on LWN and elsewhere, the Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it has finalised support for PEP 740 ( Index support for digital attestations ). Trail of Bits, who performed much of the development work, has an in-depth blog post about the work and its adoption, as well as what is left undone:
One thing is notably missing from all of this work: downstream verification. [ ] This isn t an acceptable end state (cryptographic attestations have defensive properties only insofar as they re actually verified), so we re looking into ways to bring verification to individual installing clients. In particular, we re currently working on a plugin architecture for pip that will enable users to load verification logic directly into their pip install flows.
There was an in-depth discussion on LWN s announcement page, as well as on Hacker News.

Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries At BENEVOL, the Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution workshop in Namur, Belgium, Tom Mens and Alexandre Decan presented their paper, An Overview and Catalogue of Dependency Challenges in Open Source Software Package Registries . The abstract of their paper is as follows:
While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a catalogue of dependency-related challenges that come with relying on OSS packages or libraries. The catalogue is based on the scientific literature on empirical research that has been conducted to understand, quantify and overcome these challenges. [ ]
A PDF of the paper is available online.

Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible Motiejus Jak ty posted an interesting and practical blog post on his successful attempt to reproduce the Zig programming language without using the pre-compiled binaries checked into the repository, and despite the circular dependency inherent in its bootstrapping process. As a summary, Motiejus concludes that:
I can now confidently say (and you can also check, you don t need to trust me) that there is nothing hiding in zig1.wasm [the checked-in binary] that hasn t been checked-in as a source file.
The full post is full of practical details, and includes a few open questions.

Website updates Notwithstanding the significant change to the landing page (screenshot above), there were an enormous number of changes made to our website this month. This included:
  • Alex Feyerke and Mariano Gim nez:
    • Dramatically overhaul the website s landing page with new benefit cards tailored to the expected visitors to our website and a reworking of the visual hierarchy and design. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
    • Update the System images page to document the e2fsprogs approach. [ ]
  • Chris Lamb:
  • FC (Fay) Stegerman:
    • Replace more inline markdown with HTML on the Success stories page. [ ]
    • Add some links, fix some other links and correct some spelling errors on the Tools page. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add a historical presentation ( Reproducible builds everywhere eg. in Debian, OpenWrt and LEDE ) from October 2016. [ ]
    • Add jochensp and Oejet to the list of known contributors. [ ][ ]
  • Julia Kr ger:
  • Ninette Adhikari & hulkoba:
    • Add/rework the list of success stories into a new page that clearly shows milestones in Reproducible Builds. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Philip Rinn:
    • Import 47 historical weekly reports. [ ]
  • hulkoba:
    • Add alt text to almost all images (!). [ ][ ]
    • Fix a number of links on the Talks . [ ][ ]
    • Avoid so-called ghost buttons by not using <button> elements as links, as the affordance of a <button> implies an action with (potentially) a side effect. [ ][ ]
    • Center the sponsor logos on the homepage. [ ]
    • Move publications and generate them instead from a data.yml file with an improved layout. [ ][ ]
    • Make a large number of small but impactful stylisting changes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Expand the Tools to include a number of missing tools, fix some styling issues and fix a number of stale/broken links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Misc development news

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In November, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related changes:
    • Create and introduce a new reproduce.debian.net service and subdomain [ ]
    • Make a large number of documentation changes relevant to rebuilderd. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Explain a temporary workaround for a specific issue in rebuilderd. [ ]
    • Setup another rebuilderd instance on the o4 node and update installation documentation to match. [ ][ ]
    • Make a number of helpful/cosmetic changes to the interface, such as clarifying terms and adding links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Deploy configuration to the /opt and /var directories. [ ][ ]
    • Add an infancy (or alpha ) disclaimer. [ ][ ]
    • Add more notes to the temporary rebuilderd documentation. [ ]
    • Commit an nginx configuration file for reproduce.debian.net s Stats page. [ ]
    • Commit a rebuilder-worker.conf configuration for the o5 node. [ ]
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Grant jspricke and jochensp access to the o5 node. [ ][ ]
    • Build the qemu package with the nocheck build flag. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Adapt the update_jdn.sh script for new Debian trixie systems. [ ]
    • Stop installing the PostgreSQL database engine on the o4 and o5 nodes. [ ]
    • Prevent accidental reboots of the o4 node because of a long-running job owned by josch. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo addressed a number of issues with reproduce.debian.net [ ][ ][ ][ ]. And lastly, both Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ] performed node maintenance.
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

8 June 2023

Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer: Adventures in Debian's Qt land

Debian (I might as well say "we", this is the beauty of it) is about to release Debian 12 aka Bookworm. Let's take a quick look at what is new in Debian Qt land. Qt 5 Bookworm has Qt 5.15.8, which is nothing but great news. KDE will be switching to Qt 6 sooner than later and Qt 5 has been a fun ride, but Dmitry Shachnev and I needed a break, or at very least not handling two Qt versions. But in the end I need to be fair: you REALLY need to thank Dmitry for Qt 5. He has been the man power behind it in 99.5% of the cases. Qt 6 This will be the first Debian release to have official Qt 6 packages. NOTHING would have happened if it weren't for Patrick "Delta-One" Franz standing up to maintain it. BIG kudos to him! Well, there is a "little lie" in the paragraph above. Thanks to The Qt Company and ICS the current Qt 6 version, 6.4.2, is also available as Bullseye's backports. The Qt Company really also helped us here by providing us almost-to-be-released tarballs of Qt 6.4.2 so we were able to push them to unstable and do a transition in time for freeze, thanks a lot for that! So, what is the Qt 6 state? At the binary side all but OpenGL ES support should be there. Sadly this was discovered too late in the release process and we still might need help maintaining it (read the link to know why!). We are still not building the documentation. Properly building the whole documentation, as with Qt 5, would require all the Qt submodules' source code in one place, which we can't (easily?) do in Debian. So building the doc means hacking the build system and getting semi-linked documentation, much like with Qt 5. Now if you think you have an idea to solve this... we are happy to hear from you! Another great thing to know about Qt 6 is that, thanks to Helmut Grohne, pure Qt 6 applications should be able to cross compile. Applications using multi-arch enabled libraries ought to work too. Even more, many Qt submodules themselves should also cross compile! Not all of them, as we missed some patches in time, but hey, if you need to cross compile Qt, you surely can apply them yourselves! And finally tests, unit tests. In Qt 5 we had some of those, but none yet in Qt 6. This is one of the areas I would love to be able to put time... but time is scarce. The future? In my point of view the Debian 13 "Trixie" development cycle will see Qt 5 diminishing it's usage and Qt 6 becoming the major Qt version used, but from the Qt 4 experience I do not expect Qt 5 being dropped during this release cycle... let's see what the future brings us. Thanks! While I mentioned Dmitry and Patrick many more people helped us reach this place. I personally want to thank the people behind the KDE software, both upstream and, of course, the Debian maintainers. You should be thankful with them too, many hours of effort go into this. And thanks to you our dear users. We are normally overflowed with what we have in our hands and might not be up to the task sometimes, but hey, you are part of the reason we are doing this!

21 February 2021

Dmitry Shachnev: ReText turns 10 years

Exactly ten years ago, in February 2011, the first commit in ReText git repository was made. It was just a single 364 lines Python file back then (now the project has more than 6000 lines of Python code). Since 2011, the editor migrated from SourceForge to GitHub, gained a lot of new features, and most importantly now there is an active community around it, which includes both long-time contributors and newcomers who create their first issues or pull requests. I don t always have enough time to reply to issues or implement new features myself, but the community members help me with this. Earlier this month, I made a new release (7.2), which adds a side panel with directory tree (contributed by Xavier Gouchet), option to fully highlight wrapped lines (contributed by nihillum), ability to search in the preview mode and much more see the release page on GitHub. Side panel in ReText Also a new version of PyMarkups module was released, which contains all the code for processing various markup languages. It now supports markdown-extensions.yaml files which allow specifying complex extensions options and adds initial support for MathJax 3. Also check out the release notes for 7.1 which was not announced on this blog. Future plans include making at least one more release this year, adding support for Qt 6. Qt 5 support will last for at least one more year.

1 January 2021

Dmitry Shachnev: A review of endianness bugs in Qt, and how they were fixed

As you may know, I am Qt 5 maintainer in Debian. Maintaning Qt means not only bumping the version each time a new version is released, but also making sure Qt builds successfully on all architectures that are supported in Debian (and for some submodules, the automatic tests pass). An important sort of build failures are endianness specific failures. Most widely used architectures (x86_64, aarch64) are little endian. However, Debian officially supports one big endian architecture (s390x), and unofficially a few more ports are provided, such as ppc64 and sparc64. Unfortunately, Qt upstream does not have any big endian machine in their CI system, so endianness issues get noticed only when the packages fail to build on our build daemons. In the last years I have discovered and fixed some such issues in various parts of Qt, so I decided to write a post to illustrate how to write really cross-platform C/C++ code. Issue 1: the WebP image format handler (code review) The relevant code snippet is: 
if (srcImage.format() != QImage::Format_ARGB32)
    srcImage = srcImage.convertToFormat(QImage::Format_ARGB32);
// ...
if (!WebPPictureImportBGRA(&picture, srcImage.bits(), srcImage.bytesPerLine()))  
    // ...
The code here is serializing the images into QImage::Format_ARGB32 format, and then passing the bytes into WebP s import function. With this format, the image is stored using a 32-bit ARGB format (0xAARRGGBB). This means that the bytes will be 0xBB, 0xGG, 0xRR, 0xAA or little endian and 0xAA, 0xRR, 0xGG, 0xBB on big endian. However, WebPPictureImportBGRA expects the first format on all architectures. The fix was to use QImage::Format_RGBA8888. As the QImage documentation says, with this format the order of the colors is the same on any architecture if read as bytes 0xRR, 0xGG, 0xBB, 0xAA. Issue 2: qimage_converter_map structure (code review) The code seems to already support big endian. But maybe you can spot the error? 
#if Q_BYTE_ORDER == Q_LITTLE_ENDIAN
        0,
        convert_ARGB_to_ARGB_PM,
#else
        0,
        0
#endif
It is the missing comma! It is present in the little endian block, but not in the big endian one. This was fixed trivially. Issue 3: QHandle, part of Qt 3D module (code review) QHandle class uses a union that is declared as follows: 
struct Data  
    quint32 m_index : IndexBits;
    quint32 m_counter : CounterBits;
    quint32 m_unused : 2;
 ;
union  
    Data d;
    quint32 m_handle;
 ;
The sizes are declared such as IndexBits + CounterBits + 2 is always equal to 32 (four bytes). Then we have a constructor that sets the values of Data struct: 
QHandle(quint32 i, quint32 count)
 
    d.m_index = i;
    d.m_counter = count;
    d.m_unused = 0;
The value of m_handle will be different depending on endianness! So the test that was expecting a particular value with given constructor arguments was failing. I fixed it by using the following macro: 
#if Q_BYTE_ORDER == Q_BIG_ENDIAN
#define GET_EXPECTED_HANDLE(qHandle) ((qHandle.index() << (qHandle.CounterBits + 2)) + (qHandle.counter() << 2))
#else /* Q_LITTLE_ENDIAN */
#define GET_EXPECTED_HANDLE(qHandle) (qHandle.index() + (qHandle.counter() << qHandle.IndexBits))
#endif
Issue 4: QML compiler (code review) The QML compiler used a helper class named LEUInt32 (based on QLEInteger) that always stored the numbers in little endian internally. This class can be safely mixed with native quint32 on little endian systems, but not on big endian. Usually the compiler would warn about type mismatch, but here the code used reinterpret_cast, such as: 
quint32 *objectTable = reinterpret_cast<quint32*>(data + qmlUnit->offsetToObjects);
So this was not noticed on build time, but the compiler was crashing. The fix was trivial again, replacing quint32 with QLEUInt32. Issue 5: QModbusPdu, part of Qt Serial Bus module (code review) The code snippet is simple: 
QModbusPdu::FunctionCode code = QModbusPdu::Invalid;
if (stream.readRawData((char *) (&code), sizeof(quint8)) != sizeof(quint8))
    return stream;
QModbusPdu::FunctionCode is an enum, so code is a multi-byte value (even if only one byte is significant). However, (char *) (&code) returns a pointer to the first byte of it. It is the needed byte on little endian systems, but it is the wrong byte on big endian ones! The correct fix was using a temporary one-byte variable: 
quint8 codeByte = 0;
if (stream.readRawData((char *) (&codeByte), sizeof(quint8)) != sizeof(quint8))
    return stream;
QModbusPdu::FunctionCode code = (QModbusPdu::FunctionCode) codeByte;
Issue 6: qt_is_ascii (code review) This function, as the name says, checks whether a string is ASCII. It does that by splitting the string into 4-byte chunks: 
while (ptr + 4 <= end)  
    quint32 data = qFromUnaligned<quint32>(ptr);
    if (data &= 0x80808080U)  
        uint idx = qCountTrailingZeroBits(data);
        ptr += idx / 8;
        return false;
     
    ptr += 4;
idx / 8 is the number of trailing zero bytes. However, the bytes which are trailing on little endian are actually leading on big endian! So we can use qCountLeadingZeroBits there. Issue 7: the bundled copy of tinycbor (upstream pull request) Similar to issue 5, the code was reading into the wrong byte: 
if (bytesNeeded <= 2)  
    read_bytes_unchecked(it, &it->extra, 1, bytesNeeded);
    if (bytesNeeded == 2)
        it->extra = cbor_ntohs(it->extra);
extra has type uint16_t, so it has two bytes. When we need only one byte, we read into the wrong byte, so the resulting number is 256 times higher on big endian than it should be. Adding a temporary one-byte variable fixed it. Issue 8: perfparser, part of Qt Creator (code review) Here it is not trivial to find the issue just looking at the code: 
qint32 dataStreamVersion = qToLittleEndian(QDataStream::Qt_DefaultCompiledVersion);
However the linker was producing an error:
undefined reference to QDataStream::Version qbswap(QDataStream::Version)'
On little endian systems, qToLittleEndian is a no-op, but on big endian systems, it is a template function defined for some known types. But it turns out we need to explicitly convert enum values to a simple type, so the fix was passing qint32(QDataStream::Qt_DefaultCompiledVersion) to that function. Issue 9: Qt Personal Information Management (code review) The code in test was trying to represent a number as a sequence of bytes, using reinterpret_cast: 
static inline QContactId makeId(const QString &managerName, uint id)
 
    return QContactId(QStringLiteral("qtcontacts:basic%1:").arg(managerName), QByteArray(reinterpret_cast<const char *>(&id), sizeof(uint)));
The order of bytes will be different on little endian and big endian systems! The fix was adding this line to the beginning of the function: 
id = qToLittleEndian(id);
This will cause the bytes to be reversed on big endian systems. What remains unfixed There are still some bugs, which require deeper investigation, for example: P.S. We are looking for new people to help with maintaining Qt 6. Join our team if you want to do some fun work like described above!

18 August 2020

Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer: Stepping down as Qt 6 maintainers

After quite some time maintaining Qt in Debian both Dmitry Shachnev and I decided to not maintain Qt 6 when it's published (expected in December 2020, see https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_6.0_Release). We will do our best to keep the Qt 5 codebase up and running.

We **love** Qt, but it's a huge codebase and requires time and build power, both things that we are currently lacking, so we decided it's time for us to step down and pass the torch. And a new major version seems the right point to do that.

We will be happy to review and/or sponsor other people's work or even occasionally do uploads, but we can't promise to do it regularly.

Some things we think potential Qt 6 maintainers should be familiar with are, of course, C++ packaging (specially symbols files) and CMake, as Qt 6 will be built with it.

We also encourage prospective maintainers to remove the source's -everywhere-src suffixes and just keep the base names as source package names: qtbase6, qtdeclarative6, etc.

It has been an interesting ride all these years, we really hope you enjoyed using Qt.

Thanks for everything,

Dmitry and Lisandro.Note 20200818 12:12 ARST: I was asked if the move has anything to do with code quality or licensing. The answer is a huge no, Qt is a **great** project which we love. As stated before it's mostly about lack of free time to properly maintain it.


1 April 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (March 2020)

In March 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 10.25 hours (of 10.25 hours planned). LTS Work Other security related work for Debian Credits A very big thanks goes to Utkarsh Gupta, a colleague from the Debian LTS team, who sponsored all my uploads and who sent the DLA mails on my behalf, while I was (and still am) in self-induced GPG lockdown (I forgot to update my GPG public key in Debian's GPG keyring). Thanks, Utkarsh! References

30 March 2020

Mike Gabriel: UBports: Packaging of Lomiri Operating Environment for Debian (part 02)

Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri. Recent Uploads to Debian related to Lomiri Over the past 7-8 weeks the packaging progress has been slowed down due to other projects I am working on in parallel. However, quite a few things have been achieved: The packages qtsystems, qtfeedback, and qtpim are no official Qt5 components, and so I had to package Git snapshots of them; with all implicit consequences regarding ABI and API compatibilities, possibly Debian-internal library transitions, etc. Esp. packaging qtsystems was pretty tricky due to a number of failing unit tests when the package had been built in a clean chroot (like it is the case on Debian's buildd infrastructure). I learned a lot about DBus and DBus mocking while working on all those unit tests to finally pass in chrooted builds. Unfortunately, the Lomiri App Launch component still needs more work due to (finally only) one unit test (jobs-systemd) not always passing. Sometimes, the test gets stucks and then fails after having reached a time out. I'll add it to my list of those unreproducible build failures I have recently seen in several GTest related unit test scenarios. Sigh... Credits A great thanks goes to Lisandro Perez Meyer from the Debian KDE/Qt Team for providing an intro and help on Qt Debian packaging and an intro on symbols handling with C++ projects. Another big thanks goes to Dmitry Shachnev from the Debian KDE/Qt Team for doing a sponsored upload [1] of qtpim (and also a nice package review). Also a big thanks goes to Marius Gripsgard for his work on forking the first Lomiri components on the UBports upstream side. Previous Posts about my Debian UBports Team Efforts References

20 November 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #133

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday November 5 and Saturday November 11 2017: Upcoming events On November 17th Chris Lamb will present at Open Compliance Summit, Yokohama, Japan on how reproducible builds ensures the long-term sustainability of technology infrastructure. We plan to hold an assembly at 34C3 - hope to see you there! LEDE CI tests Thanks to the work of lynxis, Mattia and h01ger, we're now testing all LEDE packages in our setup. This is our first result for the ar71xx target: "502 (100.0%) out of 502 built images and 4932 (94.8%) out of 5200 built packages were reproducible in our test setup." - see below for details how this was achieved. Bootstrapping and Diverse Double Compilation As a follow-up of a discussion on bootstrapping compilers we had on the Berlin summit, Bernhard and Ximin worked on a Proof of Concept for Diverse Double Compilation of tinycc (aka tcc). Ximin Luo did a successful diverse-double compilation of tinycc git HEAD using gcc-7.2.0, clang-4.0.1, icc-18.0.0 and pgcc-17.10-0 (pgcc needs to triple-compile it). More variations are planned for the future, with the eventual aim to reproduce the same binaries cross-distro, and extend it to test GCC itself. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches filed upstream: Patches filed in Debian: Patches filed in OpenSUSE: Reviews of unreproducible packages 73 package reviews have been added, 88 have been updated and 40 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 4 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 88~bpo9+1 to stretch-backports. reprotest development reproducible-website development theunreproduciblepackage development tests.reproducible-builds.org in detail Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

29 August 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #122

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 20 and Saturday August 26 2017: Debian development Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Forwarded upstream: Accepted repoducibility NMUs in Debian: Other issues: Reviews of unreproducible packages 16 package reviews have been added, 38 have been updated and 48 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development disorderfs development Version 0.5.2-1 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from: reprotest development Misc. This week's edition was written in alphabetical order by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

12 July 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 115 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 2 and Saturday July 8 2017: Reproducible work in other projects Ed Maste pointed to a thread on the LLVM developer mailing list about container iteration being the main source of non-determinism in LLVM, together with discussion on how to solve this. Ignoring build path issues, container iteration order was also the main issue with rustc, which was fixed by using a fixed-order hash map for certain compiler structures. (It was unclear from the thread whether LLVM's builds are truly path-independent or rather that they haven't done comparisons between builds run under different paths.) Bugs filed Patches submitted upstream: Reviews of unreproducible packages 52 package reviews have been added, 62 have been updated and 20 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. No issue types were updated or added this week. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development Development continued in git with contributions from: With these changes, we are able to generate a dynamically loaded HTML diff for GCC-6 that can be displayed in a normal web browser. For more details see this mailing list post. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

19 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 77 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - 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: Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux: Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

21 July 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 62 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 26th and July 2nd 2016: Read on to find out why we're lagging some weeks behind ! GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes With the doxygen upload we are now down to only 2 modified packages in our repository: dpkg and rdfind. Weekly reports delay and the future of statistics To catch up with our backlog of weekly reports we have decided to skip some of the statistics for this week. We might publish them in a future report, or we might switch to a format where we summarize them more (and which we can create (even) more automatically), we'll see. We are doing these weekly statistics because we believe it's appropriate and useful to credit people's work and make it more visible. What do you think? We would love to hear your thoughts on this matter! Do you read these statistics? Somewhat? Actually, thanks to the power of notmuch, Holger came up with what you can see below, so what's missing for this week are the uploads fixing irreprodubilities. Which we really would like to show for the reasons stated above and because we really really need these uploads to happen ;-) But then we also like to confirm the bugs are really gone, which (atm) requires manual checking, and to look for the words "reproducible" and "deterministic" (and spelling variations) in debian/changelogs of all uploads, to spot reproducible work not tracked via the BTS. And we still need to catch up on the backlog of weekly reports. Bugs submitted with reproducible usertags It seems DebCamp in Cape Town was hugely successful and made some people get a lot of work done: 61 bugs have been filed with reproducible builds usertags and 60 of them had patches: Package reviews 437 new reviews have been added (though most of them were just linking the bug, "only" 56 new issues in packages were found), an unknown number has been been updated and 60 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 4 new issue types have been found: Weekly QA work 98 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Santiago Vila. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Mattia Rizzolo, Reiner Herrmann, Ceridwen and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

15 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 59 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 5th and June 11th 2016: Media coverage Ed Maste gave a talk at BSDCan 2016 on reproducible builds (slides, video). GSoC and Outreachy updates Weekly reports by our participants: Documentation update - Ximin Luo proposed a modification to our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH spec explaining FORCE_SOURCE_DATE. Some upstream build tools (e.g. TeX, see below) have expressed a desire to control which cases of embedded timestamps should obey SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. They were not convinced by our arguments on why this is a bad idea, so we agreed on an environment variable FORCE_SOURCE_DATE for them to implement their desired behaviour - named generically, so that at least we can set it centrally. For more details, see the text just linked. However, we strongly urge most build tools not to use this, and instead obey SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH unconditionally in all cases. Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 16 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: apertium-dan-nor apertium-swe-nor asterisk-prompt-fr-armelle blktrace canl-c code-saturne coinor-symphony dsc-statistics frobby libphp-jpgraph paje.app proxycheck pybit spip tircd xbs The following 5 packages are new in Debian and appear to be reproducible so far: golang-github-bowery-prompt golang-github-pkg-errors golang-gopkg-dancannon-gorethink.v2 libtask-kensho-perl sspace The following packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again after being fixed: 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 68 reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 28 have been removed in this week. New and updated issues: 26 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, 1 by Santiago Vila and 1 by Sascha Steinbiss. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development disorderfs development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Steven Chamberlain submitted a patch to FreeBSD's makefs to allow reproducible builds of the kfreebsd installer. Ed Maste committed a patch to FreeBSD's binutils to enable determinstic archives by default in GNU ar. Helmut Grohne experimented with cross+native reproductions of dash with some success, using rebootstrap. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

22 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 56 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 15th and May 21st 2016: Media coverage Blog posts from our GSoC and Outreachy contributors: Documentation update Ximin Luo clarified instructions on how to set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Packages fixed The following 18 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: abiword angband apt-listbugs asn1c bacula-doc bittornado cdbackup fenix gap-autpgrp gerbv jboss-logging-tools invokebinder modplugtools objenesis pmw r-cran-rniftilib x-loader zsnes 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: Reproducibility-related bugs filed: Package reviews 51 reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 15 have been removed in this week. 22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila, Niko Tyni and Daniel Schepler. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

10 May 2016

Dmitry Shachnev: ReText 6.0 and PyMarkups 2.0 released

Today I have released the new major version of the ReText editor. This release would not be possible without Maurice van der Pot who was the author of the greatest features because of which the version number was bumped: Other news worth mentioning are: As usual, some bugs have been fixed (most of fixes have also been backported to 5.3.1 release), and some translations have been updated from Transifex. Please report any bugs you find to our issue tracker.

22 December 2015

Dmitry Shachnev: ReText 5.3 released

On Sunday I have released ReText 5.3, and here finally comes the official announcement. Highlights in this release are: Also, a week before ReText 5.3 a new version of PyMarkups was released, bringing enhanced support for the Textile markup. You can now edit Textile files in ReText too, provided that python-textile module for Python 3 is installed. As usual, you can get the latest release from PyPI or from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories. Please report any bugs you find to our issue tracker.

10 December 2015

Dmitry Shachnev: Magic infinite sequences for Python

Today I have released a small module for Python 3 that implements cached lazy infinite sequences. Here are some examples that demonstrate what this module can do: 
>>> InfSequence(5, 6, ...)
<InfSequence: 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...>
>>> InfSequence.geometric_progression(9)
<InfSequence: 1 9 81 729 6561 59049 ...>
>>> InfSequence.cycle('foo', 'bar')
<InfSequence: 'foo' 'bar' 'foo' 'bar' 'foo' 'bar' ...>
>>> InfSequence.fibonacci()
<InfSequence: 0 1 1 2 3 5 ...>
Slicing works: 
>>> InfSequence(5, 6, ...)[5:]
<InfSequence: 10 11 12 13 14 15 ...>
>>> InfSequence(5, 6, ...)[5::2]
<InfSequence: 10 12 14 16 18 20 ...>
A somewhat reverse operation: 
>>> (2, 3, 4) + InfSequence(5, 6, ...)
<InfSequence: 2 3 4 5 6 7 ...>
Various arithmetic operations are supported: 
>>> InfSequence(1, 2, ...) ** 2
<InfSequence: 1 4 9 16 25 36 ...>
>>> InfSequence(3, 5, ...) - InfSequence(1, 2, ...)
<InfSequence: 2 3 4 5 6 7 ...>
>>> InfSequence(1, 2, ...).partial_sum(10)
55
More magic methods: 
>>> InfSequence(1, 2, ...).accumulate()
<InfSequence: 1 3 6 10 15 21 ...>
>>> InfSequence(0, 2, ...) @ InfSequence(1)
<InfSequence: 1 4 9 16 25 36 ...>
For the complete API overview, please look at the documentation. You can install the module from PyPI. It is licensed under 3-clause BSD license. The source code is available on GitHub.

Dmitry Shachnev: Magic infinite sequences for Python

Today I have released a small module for Python 3 that implements cached lazy infinite sequences. Here are some examples that demonstrate what this module can do: 
>>> InfSequence(5, 6, ...)
<InfSequence: 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...>
>>> InfSequence.geometric_progression(9)
<InfSequence: 1 9 81 729 6561 59049 ...>
>>> InfSequence.cycle('foo', 'bar')
<InfSequence: 'foo' 'bar' 'foo' 'bar' 'foo' 'bar' ...>
>>> InfSequence.fibonacci()
<InfSequence: 0 1 1 2 3 5 ...>
Slicing works: 
>>> InfSequence(5, 6, ...)[5:]
<InfSequence: 10 11 12 13 14 15 ...>
>>> InfSequence(5, 6, ...)[5::2]
<InfSequence: 10 12 14 16 18 20 ...>
A somewhat reverse operation: 
>>> (2, 3, 4) + InfSequence(5, 6, ...)
<InfSequence: 2 3 4 5 6 7 ...>
Various arithmetic operations are supported: 
>>> InfSequence(1, 2, ...) ** 2
<InfSequence: 1 4 9 16 25 36 ...>
>>> InfSequence(3, 5, ...) - InfSequence(1, 2, ...)
<InfSequence: 2 3 4 5 6 7 ...>
>>> InfSequence(1, 2, ...).partial_sum(10)
55
More magic methods: 
>>> InfSequence(1, 2, ...).accumulate()
<InfSequence: 1 3 6 10 15 21 ...>
>>> InfSequence(0, 2, ...) @ InfSequence(1)
<InfSequence: 1 4 9 16 25 36 ...>
For the complete API overview, please look at the documentation. You can install the module from PyPI. It is licensed under 3-clause BSD license. The source code is available on GitHub.

4 November 2015

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in October 2015

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 13.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things: I also started a conversation about what paid contributors could work on if they have some spare cycle as the current funding level might allow us to invest some time on work outside of just plain security updates. The Debian Administrator s Handbook I spent quite some time finalizing the Jessie book update, both for the content and for the layout of the printed book. Debian Handbook: cover of the jessie edition Misc Debian work GNOME 3.18. I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer working with GNOME Shell 3.18 and I filed bugs #800660 and #802480 about an annoying gnome-keyring regression I did multiple test rounds with the Debian maintainers (Dmitry Shachnev, kudos to him!) and the upstream developers (see here and here). Apart from those regressions, I like GNOME 3.18! Python-modules team migration to Git. After the Git migration, and since the team policy now imposes usage of git-dpm on all members, I made some tries with it on the python-django package while pushing version 1.8.5 to experimental. And the least I can say is that I m not pleased with the result. I thus filed 3 bugs summarizing the problems I have with git-dpm: #801666 (no way to set the upstream branch names from within the repository), #801667 (no clean way to merge between packaging branches), #801668 (does not create upstream tag immediately on tarball import). That is on top of other randomly stupid bugs that were already reported like #801548 (does not work with perfectly valid pre-existing upstream tags). Django packaging. I filed bugs on all packages build-depending on python-django that fail to build with Django 1.8 and informed them that I would upload Django 1.8 to unstable in early November (it s done already). Then I fixed python-django-jsonfield myself since Distro Tracker relies on this package. Following this small mass-bug filing, I filed a wishlist bug on devscripts to improve the mass-bug helper script (see #801926). And since I used ratt to rebuild the packages, I filed a wishlist issue on this new tool as well. Tryton 3.6 upgrade. I upgraded my own Tryton installation to version 3.6 and filed bug #803066 because the SysV init script was not working properly. That also reminded me that the DD process of Matthias Behrle (the tryton package maintainer) was stalled due to a bug in the NM infrastructure so I pinged the NM team and we sorted out a way for me to advocate him and get his process going Distro Tracker. I continued my work to refactor the way we handle incoming mail processing (branch people/hertzog/mailprocessing). It s now mostly finished and I need to deploy it in a test environment before being able to roll it out on tracker.debian.org. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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6 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 19 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-6 with improved patches from Val Lorentz. Chris Lamb submitted a patch for ibus-table which makes the output of ibus-table-createdb deterministic. Niko Tyni wrote a patch to make libmodule-build-perl linking order deterministic. Santiago Vila has been leading discussions on the best way to fix timestamps coming from Gettext POT files. Packages fixed The following 35 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-log4j2, dctrl-tools, dms, gitit, gnubik, isrcsubmit, mailutils, normaliz, oaklisp, octave-fpl, octave-specfun, octave-vrml, opencolorio, openvdb, pescetti, php-guzzlehttp, proofgeneral, pyblosxom, pyopencl, pyqi, python-expyriment, python-flask-httpauth, python-mzml, python-simpy, python-tidylib, reactive-streams, scmxx, shared-mime-info, sikuli, siproxd, srtp, tachyon, tcltk-defaults, urjtag, velvet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: The package is not in yet in unstable, but linux/4.2-1~exp1 is now reproducible! Kudos to Ben Hutchings, and most fixes are already merged upstream. 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 Some bugs that prevented packages to build successfully in the remote builders have been fixed. (h01ger) Two more amd64 build jobs have been removed from the Jenkins host in favor of six more on the new remote nodes. (h01ger) The munin graphs currently looks fine, so more amd64 jobs will probably be added in the next week. diffoscope development Version 32 of diffoscope has been released on September 3rd with the following new features: It also fixes many bugs. Head over to the changelog for the full list. Version 33 was released the day after to fix a bug introduced in the packaging. Documentation update Chris Lamb blessed the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification with the version number 1.0 . Lunar documented how the .file assembler directive can help with random filenames in debug symbols. Package reviews 235 reviews have been removed, 84 added and 277 updated this week. 29 new FTBFS bugs were filled by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), Daniel Stender, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: random_order_in_ibus_table_createdb_output, random_order_in_antlr_output, nondetermistic_link_order_in_module_build, and timestamps_in_tex_documents. Misc. Thanks to Dhole and Thomas Vincent, the talk held at DebConf15 now has subtitles! Void Linux started to merge changes to make packages produced by xbps reproducible.

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