Search Results: "Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras"

26 November 2025

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2025)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

29 July 2025

Christoph Berg: The Debian Conference 2025 in Brest

It's Sunday and I'm now sitting in the train from Brest to Paris where I will be changing to Germany, on the way back from the annual Debian conference. A full week of presentations, discussions, talks and socializing is laying behind me and my head is still spinning from the intensity.
Pollito and the gang of DebConf mascots wearing their conference badgesPollito and the gang of DebConf mascots wearing their conference badges (photo: Christoph Berg)
Sunday, July 13th It started last Sunday with traveling to the conference. I got on the Eurostar in Duisburg and we left on time, but even before reaching Cologne, the train was already one hour delayed for external reasons, collecting yet another hour between Aachen and Liege for its own technical problems. "The train driver is working on trying to fix the problem." My original schedule had well over two hours for changing train stations in Paris, but being that late, I missed the connection to Brest in Montparnasse. At least in the end, the total delay was only one hour when finally arriving at the destination. Due to the French julliet quatorze fireworks approaching, buses in Brest were rerouted, but I managed to catch the right bus to the conference venue, already meeting a few Debian people on the way. The conference was hosted at the IMT Atlantique Brest campus, giving the event a nice university touch. I arrived shortly after 10 in the evening and after settling down a bit, got on one of the "magic" buses for transportation to the camping site where half of the attendees where stationed. I shared a mobile home with three other Debianites, where I got a small room for myself. Monday, July 14th Next morning, we took the bus back to the venue with a small breakfast and the opening session where Enrico Zini invited me to come to his and Nicolas Dandrimont's session about Debian community governance and curation, which I gladly did. Many ideas about conflict moderation and community steering were floated around. I hope some of that can be put into effect to make flamewars on the mailing lists less heated and more directed. After that, I attended Olly Betts' "Stemming with Snowball" session, which is the stemmer used also in PostgreSQL. Text search is one of the areas in PostgreSQL that I never really looked closely at, including the integration into the postgresql-common package, so it was nice to get more information about that. In preparation for the conference, a few of us Ham radio operators in Debian had decided to bring some radio gear to DebConf this year in order to perhaps spark more interest for our hobby among the fellow geeks. In the afternoon after the talks, I found a quieter spot just outside of the main hall and set up a shortwave antenna by attaching a 10m mast to one of the park benches there. The 40m band was still pretty much closed, but I could work a few stations from England, just across the channel from Bretagne, answering questions from interested passing-by Debian people between the contacts. Over time, the band opened and more European stations got into the log.
F/DF7CB in Brest (photo: Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras)
Tuesday, July 15th Tuesday started with Helmut Grohne's session about "Reviving (un)schroot". The schroot program has been Debian's standard way of managing build chroots for a long time, but it is more and more being regarded as obsolete with all kinds of newer containerization and virtualization technologies taking over. Since many bits of Debian infrastructure depend on schroot, and its user interface is still very useful, Helmut reimplemented it using Linux namespaces and the "unshare" systemcall. I had already worked with him at the Hamburg Minidebconf to replace the apt.postgresql.org buildd machinery with the new system, but we were not quite there yet (network isolation is nice, but we still sometimes need proper networking), so it was nice to see the effort is still progressing and I will give his new scripts a try when I'm back home. Next, Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson presented Debusine, a new package repository and workflow management system. It looks very promising for anyone running their own repository, so perhaps yet another bit of apt.postgresql.org infrastructure to replace in the future. After that, I went to the Debian LTS BoF session by Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Bastien Roucari s - Debian releases plus LTS is what we are covering with apt.postgresql.org. Then there were bits from the DPL (Debian Project Leader), and a session moderated by Stefano Rivera interesting to me as a member of the Debian Technical Committee on the future structure of the packages required for cross-building in Debian, a topic which had been brought to TC a while ago. I am happy that we could resolve the issue without having to issue a formal TC ruling as the involved parties (kernel, glibc, gcc and the cross-build people) found a promising way forward themselves. DebConf is really a good way to get such issues unstuck. Ten years ago at the 2015 Heidelberg DebConf, Enrico had given a seminal "Semi-serious stand-up comedy" talk, drawing parallels between the Debian Open Source community and the BDSM community - "People doing things consensually together". (Back then, the talk was announced as "probably unsuitable for people of all ages".) With his unique presentation style and witty insights, the session made a lasting impression on everyone attending. Now, ten years later (and he and many in the audience being ten years older), he gave an updated version of it. We are now looking forward to the sequel in 2035. The evening closed with the famous DebConf tradition of the Cheese & Wine party in a old fort next to the coast, just below the conference venue. Even when he's a fellow Debian Developer, Ham and also TC member, I had never met Paul Tagliamonte in person before, but we spent most of the evening together geeking out on all things Debian and Ham radio.
The northern coast of Ushant (photo: Christoph Berg)
Wednesday, July 16th Wednesday already marked the end of the first half of the week, the day of the day trips. I had chosen to go to Ouessant island (Ushant in English) which marks the Western end of French mainland and hosts one of the lighthouses yielding the way into the English channel. The ferry trip included surprisingly big waves which left some participants seasick, but everyone recovered fast. After around one and a half hours we arrived, picked up the bicycles, and spent the rest of the day roaming the island. The weather forecast was originally very cloudy and 18 C, but over noon this turned into sunny and warm, so many got an unplanned sunburn. I enjoyed the trip very much - it made up for not having time visiting the city during the week. After returning, we spent the rest of the evening playing DebConf's standard game, Mao (spoiler alert: don't follow the link if you ever intend to play).
Having a nice day (photo: Christoph Berg)
Thursday, July 17th The next day started with the traditional "Meet the Technical Committee" session. This year, we trimmed the usual slide deck down to remove the boring boilerplate parts, so after a very short introduction to the work of the committee by our chairman Matthew Vernon, we opened up the discussion with the audience, with seven (out of 8) TC members on stage. I think the format worked very well, with good input from attendees. Next up was "Don't fear the TPM" by Jonathan McDowell. A common misconception in the Free Software community is that the TPM is evil DRM hardware working against the user, but while it could be used in theory that way, the necessary TPM attestations seem to impossible to attain in practice, so that wouldn't happen anyway. Instead, it is a crypto coprocessor present in almost all modern computers that can be used to hold keys, for example to be used for SSH. It will also be interesting to research if we can make use of it for holding the Transparent Data Encryption keys for CYBERTEC's PostgreSQL Enterprise Edition. Aigars Mahinovs then directed everyone in place for the DebConf group picture, and Lucas Nussbaum started a discussion about archive-wide QA tasks in Debian, an area where I did a lot of work in the past and that still interests me. Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers followed up with techniques to track archive-wide rebuilding and testing of packages and in turn filing a lot of bugs to track the problems. The evening ended with the conference dinner, again in the fort close by the coast. DebConf is good for meeting new people, and I incidentally ran into another Chris, who happened to be one of the original maintainers of pgaccess, the pre-predecessor of today's pgadmin. I admit still missing this PostgreSQL frontend for its simplicity and ability to easily edit table data, but it disappeared around 2004. Friday, July 18th On Friday, I participated in discussion sessions around contributors.debian.org (PostgreSQL is planning to set up something similar) and the New Member process which I had helped to run and reform a decade or two ago. Agathe Porte (also a Ham radio operator, like so many others at the conference I had no idea of) then shared her work on rust-rewriting the slower parts of Lintian, the Debian package linter. Craig Small talked about "Free as in Bytes", the evolution of the Linux procps free command. Over the time and many kernel versions, the summary numbers printed became better and better, but there will probably never be a version that suits all use cases alike. Later over dinner, Craig (who is also a TC member) and I shared our experiences with these numbers and customers (not) understanding them. He pointed out that for PostgreSQL and looking at used memory in the presence of large shared memory buffers, USS (unique set size) and PSS (proportional set size) should be more realistic numbers than the standard RSS (resident set size) that the top utility is showing by default. Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers again joined to lead a session, now on ci.debian.net and autopkgtest, the test driver used for running tests on packages after then have been installed on a system. The PostgreSQL packages are heavily using this to make sure no regressions creep in even after builds have successfully completed and test re-runs are rescheduled periodically. The day ended with Bdale Garbee's electronics team BoF and Paul Tagliamonte and me setting up the radio station in the courtyard, again answering countless questions about ionospheric conditions and operating practice. Saturday, July 19th Saturday was the last conference day. In the first session, Nikos Tsipinakis and Federico Vaga from CERN announced that the LHC will be moving to Debian for the accelerator's frontend computers in their next "long shutdown" maintenance period in the next year. CentOS broke compatibility too often, and Debian trixie together with the extended LTS support will cover the time until the next long shutdown window in 2035, until when the computers should have all been replaced with newer processors covering higher x86_64 baseline versions. The audience was very delighted to hear that Debian is now also being used in this prestige project. Ben Hutchings then presented new Linux kernel features. Particularly interesting for me was the support for atomic writes spanning more than one filesystem block. When configured correctly, this would mean PostgreSQL didn't have to record full-page images in the WAL anymore, increasing throughput and performance. After that, the Debian ftp team discussed ways to improve review of new packages in the archive, and which of their processes could be relaxed with new US laws around Open Source and cryptography algorithms export. Emmanuel Arias led a session on Salsa CI, Debian's Gitlab instance and standard CI pipeline. (I think it's too slow, but the runners are not under their control.) Julian Klode then presented new features in APT, Debian's package manager. I like the new display format (and a tiny bit of that is also from me sending in wishlist bugs). In the last round of sessions this week, I then led the Ham radio BoF with an introduction into the hobby and how Debian can be used. Bdale mentioned that the sBitx family of SDR radios is natively running Debian, so stock packages can be used from the radio's touch display. We also briefly discussed his involvement in ARDC and the possibility to get grants from them for Ham radio projects. Finally, DebConf wrapped up with everyone gathering in the main auditorium and cheering the organizers for making the conference possible and passing Pollito, the DebConf mascot, to the next organizer team.
Pollito on stage (photo: Christoph Berg)
Sunday, July 20th Zoom back to the train: I made it through the Paris metro and I'm now on the Eurostar back to Germany. It has been an intense week with all the conference sessions and meeting all the people I had not seen so long. There are a lot of new ideas to follow up on both for my Debian and PostgreSQL work. Next year's DebConf will take place in Santa Fe, Argentina. I haven't yet decided if I will be going, but I can recommend the experience to everyone! The post The Debian Conference 2025 in Brest appeared first on CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Services & Support.

8 August 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2024

Welcome to the July 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Reproducible Builds Summit 2024
  2. Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps
  3. Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?
  4. AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts
  5. Community updates
  6. Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog
  7. Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems
  8. Development news
  9. Website updates
  10. Upstream patches
  11. Reproducibility testing framework

Reproducible Builds Summit 2024 Last month, we were very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps (LWN) In a recent edition of Linux Weekly News, Daroc Alden has written an article on bootstrappable builds. Starting with a brief introduction that
a bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process.
The article goes onto to describe that now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all. and concludes:
The real benefit of bootstrappable builds comes from a few things. Like reproducible builds, they can make users more confident that the binary packages downloaded from a package mirror really do correspond to the open-source project whose source code they can inspect. Bootstrappable builds have also had positive effects on the complexity of building a Linux distribution from scratch [ ]. But most of all, bootstrappable builds are a boon to the longevity of our software ecosystem. It s easy for old software to become unbuildable. By having a well-known, self-contained chain of software that can build itself from a small seed, in a variety of environments, bootstrappable builds can help ensure that today s software is not lost, no matter where the open-source community goes from here

Towards Idempotent Rebuilds? Trisquel developer Simon Josefsson wrote an interesting blog post comparing the output of the .deb files from our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework and the ones in the official Debian archive. Following up from a previous post on the reproducibility of Trisquel, Simon notes that typically [the] rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible , Simon correctly identifies that the purpose of [these] rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match. However, Simon s post swiftly moves on to announce a new tool called debdistrebuild that performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline and displays diffoscope output for further analysis.

AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts Mehdi Keshani, Tudor-Gabriel Velican, Gideon Bot and Sebastian Proksch of the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, have published a new paper in the ACM Software Engineering on a new tool to automatically reproduce Apache Maven artifacts:
Reproducible Central is an initiative that curates a list of reproducible Maven libraries, but the list is limited and challenging to maintain due to manual efforts. [We] investigate the feasibility of automatically finding the source code of a library from its Maven release and recovering information about the original release environment. Our tool, AROMA, can obtain this critical information from the artifact and the source repository through several heuristics and we use the results for reproduction attempts of Maven packages. Overall, our approach achieves an accuracy of up to 99.5% when compared field-by-field to the existing manual approach [and] we reveal that automatic reproducibility is feasible for 23.4% of the Maven packages using AROMA, and 8% of these packages are fully reproducible.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:
  • Nichita Morcotilo reached out to the community, first to share their efforts to build reproducible packages cross-platform with a new build tool called rattler-build, noting that as you can imagine, building packages reproducibly on Windows is the hardest challenge (so far!) . Nichita goes onto mention that the Apple ecosystem appears to be using ZERO_AR_DATE over SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus announced that the Debian bookworm 12.6 live images are nearly reproducible , with more detail in the post itself and input in the thread from other contributors.
  • As reported in last month s report, Pol Dellaiera completed his master thesis on Reproducibility in Software Engineering at the University of Mons, Belgium. This month, Pol announced this on the list with more background info. Since the master thesis sources have been available, it has received some feedback and contributions. As a result, an updated version of the thesis has been published containing those community fixes.
  • Daniel Gr ber asked for help in getting the Yosys documentation to build reproducibly, citing issues in inter alia the PDF generation causing differing CreationDate metadata values.
  • James Addison continued his long journey towards getting the Sphinx documentation generator to build reproducible documentation. In this thread, James concerns himself with the problem that even when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is configured, Sphinx projects that have configured their copyright notices using dynamic elements can produce nonsensical output under some circumstances. James query ended up generating a number of replies.
  • Allen gunner Gunner posted a brief update on the progress the core team is making towards introducing a Code of Conduct (CoC) such that it is in place in time for the RB Summit in Hamburg in September . In particular, gunner asks if you are interested in helping with CoC design and development in the weeks ahead, simply email rb-core@lists.reproducible-builds.org and let us know . [ ]

Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog On our mailing list, Fay Stegerman announced a new Reproducible Builds collaboration in the Android ecosystem:
We are pleased to announce Reproducible Builds, special client support and more in our repo : a collaboration between various independent interoperable projects: the IzzyOnDroid team, 3rd-party clients Droid-ify & Neo Store, and rbtlog (part of my collection of tools for Android Reproducible Builds) to bring Reproducible Builds to IzzyOnDroid and the wider Android ecosystem.

Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems Congratulations to Marina Moore of the New York Tandon School of Engineering who has submitted her PhD thesis on Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems. The introduction outlines its contributions to the field:
[S]oftware repositories are a vital component of software development and release, with packages downloaded both for direct use and to use as dependencies for other software. Further, when software is updated due to patched vulnerabilities or new features, it is vital that users are able to see and install this patched version of the software. However, this process of updating software can also be the source of attack. To address these attacks, secure software update systems have been proposed. However, these secure software update systems have seen barriers to widespread adoption. The Update Framework (TUF) was introduced in 2010 to address several attacks on software update systems including repository compromise, rollback attacks, and arbitrary software installation. Despite this, compromises continue to occur, with millions of users impacted by such compromises. My work has addressed substantial challenges to adoption of secure software update systems grounded in an understanding of practical concerns. Work with industry and academic communities provided opportunities to discover challenges, expand adoption, and raise awareness about secure software updates. [ ]

Development news In Debian this month, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 13 were updated and 6 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new toolchain issue type was identified as well, specifically ordering_differences_in_pkg_info.
Colin Percival filed a bug against the LLVM compiler noting that building i386 binaries on the i386 architecture is different when building i386 binaries under amd64. The fix was narrowed down to x87 excess precision, which can result in slightly different register choices when the compiler is hosted on x86_64 or i386 and a fix committed. [ ]
Fay Stegerman performed some in-depth research surrounding her apksigcopier tool, after some Android .apk files signed with the latest apksigner could no longer be verified as reproducible. Fay identified the issue as follows:
Since build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, backwards-incompatible changes to apksigner break apksigcopier as it now by default forcibly replaces existing alignment padding and changed the default page alignment from 4k to 16k (same as Android Gradle Plugin >= 8.3, so the latter is only an issue when using older AGP). [ ]
She documented multiple available workarounds and filed a bug in Google s issue tracker.
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded version 272 and Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 273 to Debian, and the following changes were made as well:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Ensure that the convert utility is from ImageMagick version 6.x. The command-line interface has seemingly changed with the 7.x series of ImageMagick. [ ]
    • Factor out version detection in test_jpeg_image. [ ]
    • Correct the import of the identify_version method after a refactoring change in a previous commit. [ ]
    • Move away from using DSA OpenSSH keys in tests as support has been deprecated and removed in OpenSSH version 9.8p1. [ ]
    • Move to assert_diff in the test_openssh_pub_key package. [ ]
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Add support for ffmpeg version 7.x which adds some extra context to the diff. [ ]
    • Rework the handling of OpenSSH testing of DSA keys if OpenSSH is strictly 9.7, and add an OpenSSH key test with a ed25519-format key [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarily disable a few packages that are not available in Debian testing. [ ][ ]
    • Stop ignoring the results of Debian testing in the continuous integration system. [ ]
    • Adjust options in debian/source to make sure not to pack the Python sdist directory into the binary Debian package. [ ]
    • Adjust Lintian overrides. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

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:

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 July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Grant bremner access to the ionos7 node. [ ][ ]
  • Perform a dummy change to force update of all jobs. [ ][ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian performed some necessary node maintenance of the underlying build hosts. [ ]
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:

6 December 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2023

Welcome to the November 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Amazingly, the agenda and all notes from all sessions are all online many thanks to everyone who wrote notes from the sessions. As a followup on one idea, started at the summit, Alexander Couzens and Holger Levsen started work on a cache (or tailored front-end) for the snapshot.debian.org service. The general idea is that, when rebuilding Debian, you do not actually need the whole ~140TB of data from snapshot.debian.org; rather, only a very small subset of the packages are ever used for for building. It turns out, for amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64 and s390 for Debian trixie, unstable and experimental, this is only around 500GB ie. less than 1%. Although the new service not yet ready for usage, it has already provided a promising outlook in this regard. More information is available on https://rebuilder-snapshot.debian.net and we hope that this service becomes usable in the coming weeks. The adjacent picture shows a sticky note authored by Jan-Benedict Glaw at the summit in Hamburg, confirming Holger Levsen s theory that rebuilding all Debian packages needs a very small subset of packages, the text states that 69,200 packages (in Debian sid) list 24,850 packages in their .buildinfo files, in 8,0200 variations. This little piece of paper was the beginning of rebuilder-snapshot and is a direct outcome of the summit! The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Beyond Trusting FOSS presentation at SeaGL On November 4th, Vagrant Cascadian presented Beyond Trusting FOSS at SeaGL in Seattle, WA in the United States. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. The summary of Vagrant s talk mentions that it will:
[ ] introduce the concepts of Reproducible Builds, including best practices for developing and releasing software, the tools available to help diagnose issues, and touch on progress towards solving decades-old deeply pervasive fundamental security issues Learn how to verify and demonstrate trust, rather than simply hoping everything is OK!
Germane to the contents of the talk, the slides for Vagrant s talk can be built reproducibly, resulting in a PDF with a SHA1 of cfde2f8a0b7e6ec9b85377eeac0661d728b70f34 when built on Debian bookworm and c21fab273232c550ce822c4b0d9988e6c49aa2c3 on Debian sid at the time of writing.

Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar have published an article in a Special Issue of the IEEE s Security & Privacy magazine. Entitled A Viewpoint on Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security: A Research Agenda, the paper justifies the need for reproducible builds to reach developers and end-users specifically, and furthermore points out some under-researched topics that we have seen mentioned in interviews. An author pre-print of the article is available in PDF form.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:

openSUSE updates Bernhard M. Wiedemann has created a wiki page outlining an proposal to create a general-purpose Linux distribution which consists of 100% bit-reproducible packages albeit minus the embedded signature within RPM files. It would be based on openSUSE Tumbleweed or, if available, its Slowroll-variant. In addition, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Ubuntu Launchpad now supports .buildinfo files Back in 2017, Steve Langasek filed a bug against Ubuntu s Launchpad code hosting platform to report that .changes files (artifacts of building Ubuntu and Debian packages) reference .buildinfo files that aren t actually exposed by Launchpad itself. This was causing issues when attempting to process .changes files with tools such as Lintian. However, it was noticed last month that, in early August of this year, Simon Quigley had resolved this issue, and .buildinfo files are now available from the Launchpad system.

PHP reproducibility updates There have been two updates from the PHP programming language this month. Firstly, the widely-deployed PHPUnit framework for the PHP programming language have recently released version 10.5.0, which introduces the inclusion of a composer.lock file, ensuring total reproducibility of the shipped binary file. Further details and the discussion that went into their particular implementation can be found on the associated GitHub pull request. In addition, the presentation Leveraging Nix in the PHP ecosystem has been given in late October at the PHP International Conference in Munich by Pol Dellaiera. While the video replay is not yet available, the (reproducible) presentation slides and speaker notes are available.

diffoscope changes diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including:
  • Improving DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z. [ ]
  • Adding a missing RequiredToolNotFound import. [ ]
  • As a UI/UX improvement, try and avoid printing an extended traceback if diffoscope runs out of memory. [ ]
  • Mark diffoscope as stable on PyPI.org. [ ]
  • Uploading version 252 to Debian unstable. [ ]

Website updates A huge number of notes were added to our website that were taken at our recent Reproducible Builds Summit held between October 31st and November 2nd in Hamburg, Germany. In particular, a big thanks to Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Daan De Meyer, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Holger Levsen and Orhun Parmaks z. In addition to this, a number of other changes were made, including:

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:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Track packages marked as Priority: important in a new package set. [ ][ ]
    • Stop scheduling packages that fail to build from source in bookworm [ ] and bullseye. [ ].
    • Add old releases dashboard link in web navigation. [ ]
    • Permit re-run of the pool_buildinfos script to be re-run for a specific year. [ ]
    • Grant jbglaw access to the osuosl4 node [ ][ ] along with lynxis [ ].
    • Increase RAM on the amd64 Ionos builders from 48 GiB to 64 GiB; thanks IONOS! [ ]
    • Move buster to archived suites. [ ][ ]
    • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16 in order to improve stability [ ], reduce the workers for amd64 from 32 to 28 and, for i386, reduce from 12 down to 8 [ ].
    • Show the entire build history of each Debian package. [ ]
    • Stop scheduling already tested package/version combinations in Debian bookworm. [ ]
  • Snapshot service for rebuilders
    • Add an HTTP-based API endpoint. [ ][ ]
    • Add a Gunicorn instance to serve the HTTP API. [ ]
    • Add an NGINX config [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • System-health:
    • Detect failures due to HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors. [ ]
    • Detect failures to update package sets. [ ]
    • Detect unmet dependencies. (This usually occurs with builds of Debian live-build.) [ ]
  • Misc-related changes:
    • do install systemd-ommd on jenkins. [ ]
    • fix harmless typo in squid.conf for codethink04. [ ]
    • fixup: reproducible Debian: add gunicorn service to serve /api for rebuilder-snapshot.d.o. [ ]
    • Increase codethink04 s Squid cache_dir size setting to 16 GiB. [ ]
    • Don t install systemd-oomd as it unfortunately kills sshd [ ]
    • Use debootstrap from backports when commisioning nodes. [ ]
    • Add the live_build_debian_stretch_gnome, debsums-tests_buster and debsums-tests_buster jobs to the zombie list. [ ][ ]
    • Run jekyll build with the --watch argument when building the Reproducible Builds website. [ ]
    • Misc node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]
Other changes were made as well, however, including Mattia Rizzolo fixing rc.local s Bash syntax so it can actually run [ ], commenting away some file cleanup code that is (potentially) deleting too much [ ] and fixing the html_brekages page for Debian package builds [ ]. Finally, diagnosed and submitted a patch to add a AddEncoding gzip .gz line to the tests.reproducible-builds.org Apache configuration so that Gzip files aren t re-compressed as Gzip which some clients can t deal with (as well as being a waste of time). [ ]
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:

23 July 2021

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2021)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!