Search Results: "Graham Inggs"

8 August 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2020

Welcome to the July 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these monthly reports, we round-up the things that we have been up to over the past month. As a brief refresher, the motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. (If you re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.)

General news At the upcoming DebConf20 conference (now being held online), Holger Levsen will present a talk on Thursday 27th August about Reproducing Bullseye in practice , focusing on independently verifying that the binaries distributed from ftp.debian.org were made from their claimed sources. Tavis Ormandy published a blog post making the provocative claim that You don t need reproducible builds , asserting elsewhere that the many attacks that have been extensively reported in our previous reports are fantasy threat models . A number of rebuttals have been made, including one from long-time contributor Reproducible Builds contributor Bernhard Wiedemann. On our mailing list this month, Debian Developer Graham Inggs posted to our list asking for ideas why the openorienteering-mapper Debian package was failing to build on the Reproducible Builds testing framework. Chris Lamb remarked from the build logs that the package may be missing a build dependency, although Graham then used our own diffoscope tool to show that the resulting package remains unchanged with or without it. Later, Nico Tyni noticed that the build failure may be due to the relationship between the FILE C preprocessor macro and the -ffile-prefix-map GCC flag. An issue in Zephyr, a small-footprint kernel designed for use on resource-constrained systems, around .a library files not being reproducible was closed after it was noticed that a key part of their toolchain was updated that now calls --enable-deterministic-archives by default. Reproducible Builds developer kpcyrd commented on a pull request against the libsodium cryptographic library wrapper for Rust, arguing against the testing of CPU features at compile-time. He noted that:
I ve accidentally shipped broken updates to users in the past because the build system was feature-tested and the final binary assumed the instructions would be present without further runtime checks
David Kleuker also asked a question on our mailing list about using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with the install(1) tool from GNU coreutils. When comparing two installed packages he noticed that the filesystem birth times differed between them. Chris Lamb replied, realising that this was actually a consequence of using an outdated version of diffoscope and that a fix was in diffoscope version 146 released in May 2020. Later in July, John Scott posted asking for clarification regarding on the Javascript files on our website to add metadata for LibreJS, the browser extension that blocks non-free Javascript scripts from executing. Chris Lamb investigated the issue and realised that we could drop a number of unused Javascript files [ ][ ][ ] and added unminified versions of Bootstrap and jQuery [ ].

Development work

Website On our website this month, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to drop a number of unused Javascript files [ ][ ][ ] and added unminified versions of Bootstrap and jQuery [ ]. He also fixed a number of broken URLs [ ][ ]. Gonzalo Bulnes Guilpain made a large number of grammatical improvements [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] as well as some misspellings, case and whitespace changes too [ ][ ][ ]. Lastly, Holger Levsen updated the README file [ ], marked the Alpine Linux continuous integration tests as currently disabled [ ] and linked the Arch Linux Reproducible Status page from our projects page [ ].

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds. In July, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including releasing versions 150, 151, 152, 153 & 154:
  • New features:
    • Add support for flash-optimised F2FS filesystems. (#207)
    • Don t require zipnote(1) to determine differences in a .zip file as we can use libarchive. [ ]
    • Allow --profile as a synonym for --profile=-, ie. write profiling data to standard output. [ ]
    • Increase the minimum length of the output of strings(1) to eight characters to avoid unnecessary diff noise. [ ]
    • Drop some legacy argument styles: --exclude-directory-metadata and --no-exclude-directory-metadata have been replaced with --exclude-directory-metadata= yes,no . [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Pass the absolute path when extracting members from SquashFS images as we run the command with working directory in a temporary directory. (#189)
    • Correct adding a comment when we cannot extract a filesystem due to missing libguestfs module. [ ]
    • Don t crash when listing entries in archives if they don t have a listed size such as hardlinks in ISO images. (#188)
  • Output improvements:
    • Strip off the file offset prefix from xxd(1) and show bytes in groups of 4. [ ]
    • Don t emit javap not found in path if it is available in the path but it did not result in an actual difference. [ ]
    • Fix ... not available in path messages when looking for Java decompilers that used the Python class name instead of the command. [ ]
  • Logging improvements:
    • Add a bit more debugging info when launching libguestfs. [ ]
    • Reduce the --debug log noise by truncating the has_some_content messages. [ ]
    • Fix the compare_files log message when the file does not have a literal name. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Rewrite and rename exit_if_paths_do_not_exist to not check files multiple times. [ ][ ]
    • Add an add_comment helper method; don t mess with our internal list directly. [ ]
    • Replace some simple usages of str.format with Python f-strings [ ] and make it easier to navigate to the main.py entry point [ ].
    • In the RData comparator, always explicitly return None in the failure case as we return a non-None value in the success one. [ ]
    • Tidy some imports [ ][ ][ ] and don t alias a variable when we do not use it. [ ]
    • Clarify the use of a separate NullChanges quasi-file to represent missing data in the Debian package comparator [ ] and clarify use of a null diff in order to remember an exit code. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Profile the launch of libguestfs filesystems. [ ]
    • Clarify and correct our contributing info. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
Jean-Romain Garnier also made the following changes:
  • Allow passing a file with a list of arguments via diffoscope @args.txt. (!62)
  • Improve the output of side-by-side diffs by detecting added lines better. (!64)
  • Remove offsets before instructions in objdump [ ][ ] and remove raw instructions from ELF tests [ ].

Other tools strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. It is used automatically in most Debian package builds. In July, Chris Lamb ensured that we did not install the internal handler documentation generated from Perl POD documents [ ] and fixed a trivial typo [ ]. Marc Herbert added a --verbose-level warning when the Archive::Cpio Perl module is missing. (!6) reprotest is our end-user tool to build same source code twice in widely differing environments and then checks the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes to support diffoscope version 153 which had removed the (deprecated) --exclude-directory-metadata and --no-exclude-directory-metadata command-line arguments, and updated the testing configuration to also test under Python version 3.8 [ ].

Distributions

Debian In June 2020, Timo R hling filed a wishlist bug against the debhelper build tool impacting the reproducibility status of hundreds of packages that use the CMake build system. This month however, Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper version 13.2 that passes the -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=ON and -DBUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON arguments to CMake when using the (currently-experimental) Debhelper compatibility level 14. According to Niels, this change:
should fix some reproducibility issues, but may cause breakage if packages run binaries directly from the build directory.
34 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 20 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb added and categorised the nondeterministic_order_of_debhelper_snippets_added_by_dh_fortran_mod [ ] and gem2deb_install_mkmf_log [ ] toolchain issues. Lastly, Holger Levsen filed two more wishlist bugs against the debrebuild Debian package rebuilder tool [ ][ ].

openSUSE In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update. Bernhard also published the results of performing 12,235 verification builds of packages from openSUSE Leap version 15.2 and, as a result, created three pull requests against the openSUSE Build Result Compare Script [ ][ ][ ].

Other distributions In Arch Linux, there was a mass rebuild of old packages in an attempt to make them reproducible. This was performed because building with a previous release of the pacman package manager caused file ordering and size calculation issues when using the btrfs filesystem. A system was also implemented for Arch Linux packagers to receive notifications if/when their package becomes unreproducible, and packagers now have access to a dashboard where they can all see all their unreproducible packages (more info). Paul Spooren sent two versions of a patch for the OpenWrt embedded distribution for adding a build system revision to the packages manifest so that all external feeds can be rebuilt and verified. [ ][ ]

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 these patches, including: Vagrant Cascadian also reported two issues, the first regarding a regression in u-boot boot loader reproducibility for a particular target [ ] and a non-deterministic segmentation fault in the guile-ssh test suite [ ]. Lastly, Jelle van der Waa filed a bug against the MeiliSearch search API to report that it embeds the current build date.

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Tweak the rescheduling of various architecture and suite combinations. [ ][ ]
    • Fix links for 404 and not for us icons. (#959363)
    • Further work on a rebuilder prototype, for example correctly processing the sbuild exit code. [ ][ ]
    • Update the sudo configuration file to allow the node health job to work correctly. [ ]
    • Add php-horde packages back to the pkg-php-pear package set for the bullseye distribution. [ ]
    • Update the version of debrebuild. [ ]
  • System health check development:
    • Add checks for broken SSH [ ], logrotate [ ], pbuilder [ ], NetBSD [ ], unkillable processes [ ], unresponsive nodes [ ][ ][ ][ ], proxy connection failures [ ], too many installed kernels [ ], etc.
    • Automatically fix some failed systemd units. [ ]
    • Add notes explaining all the issues that hosts are experiencing [ ] and handle zipped job log files correctly [ ].
    • Separate nodes which have been automatically marked as down [ ] and show status icons for jobs with issues [ ].
  • Misc:
    • Disable all Alpine Linux jobs until they are or Alpine is fixed. [ ]
    • Perform some general upkeep of build nodes hosted by OSUOSL. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the init_node script to suggest using sudo instead of explicit logout and logins [ ][ ] and the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].
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:

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.

18 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 50 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 3rd and April 9th 2016: Media coverage Emily Ratliff wrote an article for SecurityWeek called Establishing Correspondence Between an Application and its Source Code - How Combining Two Completely Separate Open Source Projects Can Make Us All More Secure. Tails have started work on a design for freezable APT repositories to make it easier and practical to perform reproductions of an entire distribution at a given point in time, which will be needed to create reproducible installation- or live-media. Toolchain fixes Alexis Bienven e submitted patches adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in several tools: transfig, imagemagick, rdtool, and asciidoctor. boyska submitted one for python-reportlab. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330 brailleutils cglib3 gnugo libcobra-java libgnumail-java libjchart2d-java libjcommon-java libjfreechart-java libjide-oss-java liblaf-widget-java liblastfm-java liboptions-java octave-control octave-mpi octave-nan octave-parallel octave-stk octave-struct octave-tsa oar The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Several uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Other upstream fixes Alexander Batischev made a commit to make newsbeuter reproducible. tests.reproducible-builds.org Package reviews 93 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 21 updated in the previous week. 12 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. Misc. This week's edition was written by Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and Ximin Luo. With the departure of Lunar as a full-time contributor, Reproducible Builds Weekly News (this thing you're reading) has moved from his personal Debian blog on Debian People to the Reproducible Builds team web site on Debian Alioth. You may want to update your RSS or Atom feeds. Very many thanks to Lunar for writing and publishing this weekly news for so long, well & continously!

17 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 38 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 10th and January 16th:

Toolchain fixes Benjamin Drung uploaded mozilla-devscripts/0.43 which sorts the file list in preferences files. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Lunar submitted an updated patch series to make timestamps in packages created by dpkg deterministic. To ensure that the mtimes in data.tar are reproducible, with the patches, dpkg-deb uses the --clamp-mtime option added in tar/1.28-1 when available. An updated package has been uploaded to the experimental repository. This removed the need for a modified debhelper as all required changes for reproducibility have been merged or are now covered by dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: angband-doc, bible-kjv, cgoban, gnugo, pachi, wmpuzzle, wmweather, wmwork, xfaces, xnecview, xscavenger, xtrlock, virt-top. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Untested changes:

reproducible.debian.net Once again, Vagrant Cascadian is providing another armhf build system, allowing to run 6 more armhf builder jobs, right there. (h01ger) Stop requiring a modified debhelper and adapt to the latest dpkg experimental version by providing a predetermined identifier for the .buildinfo filename. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) New X.509 certificates were set up for jenkins.debian.net and reproducible.debian.net using Let's Encrypt!. Thanks to GlobalSign for providing certificates for the last year free of charge. (h01ger)

Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 32 updated in the previous week. FTBFS issues filled: 29. Thanks to Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issue identified: timestamps_in_manpages_added_by_golang_cobra.

Misc. Most of the minutes from the meetings held in Athens in December 2015 are now available to the public.

14 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 37 in Stretch cycle

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

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

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aggressive-indent-mode, circe, company-mode, db4o, dh-elpa, editorconfig-emacs, expand-region-el, f-el, geiser, hyena, js2-mode, markdown-mode, mono-fuse, mysql-connector-net, openbve, regina-normal, sml-mode, vala-mode-el. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #809780 on flask-restful by Chris Lamb: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the build system.
  • #810259 on avfs by Chris Lamb: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the build system.
  • #810509 on apt by Mattia Rizzolo: ensure a stable file order is given to the linker.

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

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

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

4 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 36 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 27th and January 2nd: Infrastructure dak now silently accepts and discards .buildinfo files (commit 1, 2), thanks to Niels Thykier and Ansgar Burchardt. This was later confirmed as working by Mattia Rizzolo. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: banshee-community-extensions, javamail, mono-debugger-libs, python-avro. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Untested changes: reproducible.debian.net The testing distribution (the upcoming stretch) is now tested on armhf. (h01ger) Four new armhf build nodes provided by Vagrant Cascandian were integrated in the infrastructer. This allowed for 9 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger) The RPM-based build system, koji, is now in unstable and testing. (Marek Marczykowski-G recki, Ximin Luo). Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 71 added and 53 updated in the previous week. 58 new FTBFS reports were made by Chris Lamb and Chris West. New issues identified this week: nondeterminstic_ordering_in_gsettings_glib_enums_xml, nondeterminstic_output_in_warnings_generated_by_breathe, qt_translate_noop_nondeterminstic_ordering. Misc. Steven Chamberlain explained in length why reproducible cross-building across architectures mattered, and posted results of his tests comparing a stage1 debootstrapped chroot of linux-i386 once done from official Debian packages, the others cross-built from kfreebsd-amd64.

15 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 29 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Emmanuel Bourg uploaded eigenbase-resgen/1.3.0.13768-2 which uses of the scm-safe comment style by default to make them deterministic. Mattia Rizzolo started a new thread on debian-devel to ask a wider audience for issues about the -Wdate-time compile time flag. When enabled, GCC and clang print warnings when __DATE__, __TIME__, or __TIMESTAMP__ are used. Having the flag set by default would prompt maintainers to remove these source of unreproducibility from the sources. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bmake, cyrus-imapd-2.4, drobo-utils, eigenbase-farrago, fhist, fstrcmp, git-dpm, intercal, libexplain, libtemplates-parser, mcl, openimageio, pcal, powstatd, ruby-aggregate, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bert, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-extendmatrix, ruby-rack-mobile-detect, ruby-remcached, ruby-stomp, ruby-test-declarative, ruby-wirble, vtprint. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net The fifth and sixth armhf build nodes have been set up, resulting in five more builder jobs for armhf. More than 10,000 packages have now been identified as reproducible with the reproducible toolchain on armhf. (Vagrant Cascadian, h01ger) Helmut Grohne and Mattia Rizzolo now have root access on all 12 build nodes used by reproducible.debian.net and jenkins.debian.net. (h01ger) reproducible-builds.org is now linked from all package pages and the reproducible.debian.net dashboard. (h01ger) profitbricks-build5-amd64 and profitbricks-build6-amd64, responsible for running amd64 tests now run 398.26 days in the future. This means that one of the two builds that are being compared will be run on a different minute, hour, day, month, and year. This is not yet the case for armhf. FreeBSD tests are also done with 398.26 days difference. (h01ger) The design of the Arch Linux test page has been greatly improved. (Levente Polyak) diffoscope development Three releases of diffoscope happened this week numbered 39 to 41. It includes support for EPUB files (Reiner Herrmann) and Free Pascal unit files, usually having .ppu as extension (Paul Gevers). The rest of the changes were mostly targetting at making it easier to run diffoscope on other systems. The tlsh, rpm, and debian modules are now all optional. The test suite will properly skip tests that need optional tools or modules when they are not available. As a result, diffosope is now available on PyPI and thanks to the work of Levente Polyak in Arch Linux. Getting these versions in Debian was a bit cumbersome. Version 39 was uploaded with an expired key (according to the keyring on ftp.debian.org which will hopefully be updated soon) which is currently handled by keeping the files in the queue without REJECTing them. This prevented any other Debian Developpers to upload the same version. Version 40 was uploaded as a source-only upload but failed to build from source which had the undesirable side effect of removing the previous version from unstable. The package faild to build from source because it was built passing -I to debbuild. This excluded the ELF object files and static archives used by the test suite from the archive, preventing the test suite to work correctly. Hopefully, in a nearby future it will be possible to implement a sanity check to prevent such mistakes in the future. It has also been identified that ppudump outputs time in the system timezone without considering the TZ environment variable. Zachary Vance and Paul Gevers raised the issue on the appropriate channels. strip-nondeterminism development Chris Lamb released strip-nondeterminism version 0.014-1 which disables stripping Mono binaries as it is too aggressive and the source of the problem is being worked on by Mono upstream. Package reviews 133 reviews have been removed, 115 added and 103 updated this week. Chris West and Chris Lamb reported 57 new FTBFS bugs. Misc. The video of h01ger and Chris Lamb's talk at MiniDebConf Cambridge is now available. h01ger gave a talk at CCC Hamburg on November 13th, which was well received and sparked some interest among Gentoo folks. Slides and video should be available shortly. Frederick Kautz has started to revive Dhiru Kholia's work on testing Fedora packages. Your editor wish to once again thank #debian-reproducible regulars for reviewing these reports weeks after weeks.

2 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 27 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: maven-plugin-tools, norwegian, ocaml-melt, python-biom-format, rivet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: The following package is currently failing to build from source but should now be reproducible: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A quick update on current statistics: testing is at 85% of packages tested reproducible with our modified packages, unstable on armhf caught up with amd64 with 80%. The schroot name used for running diffoscope when testing OpenWrt, NetBSD, Coreboot, and Arch Linux has been fixed. (h01ger, Mattia Rizzolo) Documentation update Paul Gevers documented timestamps in unit files created by the Free Pascal Compiler. reproducible-builds.org is now live. It contains a comprehensive documentation on all aspects that have been identified so far of what we call reproducible builds . It makes room for pointers to projects working on reproducible builds, news, dedicated tools, and community events. Package reviews 206 reviews have been removed, 171 added and 196 updated this week. Chris Lamb reported 28 failing to build from source issues. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_pdf_content, different_encoding_in_html_by_docbook_xsl, timestamps_in_ppu_generated_by_fpc, method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc. Misc. Andrei Borzenkov has proposed a fix for uninitialized memory in GRUB's mkimage. Uninitialized memory is one source of hard to track down reproducibility errors. Holger Levsen presented the efforts on reproduible builds at Festival de Software Libre in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

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.

1 September 2015

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2015)

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!

26 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 12 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Eric Dorlan uploaded automake-1.15/1:1.15-2 which makes the output of mdate-sh deterministic. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-8 which now honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to dh-python to make the order of the generated maintainer scripts deterministic. Chris also offered a fix for a source of non-determinism in dpkg-shlibdeps when packages have alternative dependencies. Dhole provided a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to gettext. Packages fixed The following 78 packages became reproducible in our setup due to changes in their build dependencies: chemical-mime-data, clojure-contrib, cobertura-maven-plugin, cpm, davical, debian-security-support, dfc, diction, dvdwizard, galternatives, gentlyweb-utils, gifticlib, gmtkbabel, gnuplot-mode, gplanarity, gpodder, gtg-trace, gyoto, highlight.js, htp, ibus-table, impressive, jags, jansi-native, jnr-constants, jthread, jwm, khronos-api, latex-coffee-stains, latex-make, latex2rtf, latexdiff, libcrcutil, libdc0, libdc1394-22, libidn2-0, libint, libjava-jdbc-clojure, libkryo-java, libphone-ui-shr, libpicocontainer-java, libraw1394, librostlab-blast, librostlab, libshevek, libstxxl, libtools-logging-clojure, libtools-macro-clojure, litl, londonlaw, ltsp, macsyfinder, mapnik, maven-compiler-plugin, mc, microdc2, miniupnpd, monajat, navit, pdmenu, pirl, plm, scikit-learn, snp-sites, sra-sdk, sunpinyin, tilda, vdr-plugin-dvd, vdr-plugin-epgsearch, vdr-plugin-remote, vdr-plugin-spider, vdr-plugin-streamdev, vdr-plugin-sudoku, vdr-plugin-xineliboutput, veromix, voxbo, xaos, xbae. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net The statistics on the main page of reproducible.debian.net are now updated every five minutes. A random unreviewed package is suggested in the look at a package form on every build. (h01ger) A new package set based new on the Core Internet Infrastructure census has been added. (h01ger) Testing of FreeBSD has started, though no results yet. More details have been posted to the freebsd-hackers mailing list. The build is run on a new virtual machine running FreeBSD 10.1 with 3 cores and 6 GB of RAM, also sponsored by Profitbricks. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released version 0.009 of strip-nondeterminism. The new version will strip locales from Javadoc, include the name of files causing errors, and ignore unhandled (but rare) zip64 archives. debbindiff development Lunar continued its major refactoring to enhance code reuse and pave the way to fuzzy-matching and parallel processing. Most file comparators have now been converted to the new class hierarchy. In order to support for archive formats, work has started on packaging Python bindings for libarchive. While getting support for more archive formats with a common interface is very nice, libarchive is a stream oriented library and might have bad performance with how debbindiff currently works. Time will tell if better solutions need to be found. Documentation update Lunar started a Reproducible builds HOWTO intended to explain the different aspects of making software build reproducibly to the different audiences that might have to get involved like software authors, producers of binary packages, and distributors. Package reviews 17 obsolete reviews have been removed, 212 added and 46 updated this week. 15 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and Mattia Rizzolo. Presentations Lunar presented Debian efforts and some recipes on making software build reproducibly at Libre Software Meeting 2015. Slides and a video recording are available. Misc. h01ger, dkg, and Lunar attended a Core Infrastructure Initiative meeting. The progress and tools mode for the Debian efforts were shown. Several discussions also helped getting a better understanding of the needs of other free software projects regarding reproducible builds. The idea of a global append only log, similar to the logs used for Certificate Transparency, came up on multiple occasions. Using such append only logs for keeping records of sources and build results has gotten the name Binary Transparency Logs . They would at least help identifying a compromised software signing key. Whether the benefits in using such logs justify the costs need more research.

13 February 2015

Jonathan Carter: Debconf 2016 to be hosted in Cape Town

Table Mountain, an icon of Cape Town Long story short, we put in a bid to host Debconf 16 in Cape Town, and we got it! Back at Debconf 12 (Nicaragua), many people asked me when we re hosting a Debconf in South Africa. I just laughed and said Who knows, maybe some day . During the conference I talked to Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed) who said that many people asked him too. We came to the conclusion that we d both really really want to do it but just didn t have enough time at that stage. I wanted to get to a point where I could take 6 months off for it and suggested that we prepare a bid for 2019. Stefano thought that this was quite funny, I think at some point we managed to get that estimate down to 2017-2018. That date crept back even more with great people like Allison Randal and Bernelle Verster joining our team, along with other locals Graham Inggs, Raoul Snyman, Adrianna Pi ska, Nigel Kukard, Simon Cross, Marc Welz, Neill Muller, Jan Groenewald, and our international mentors such as Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Martin Krafft and Hannes von Haugwitz. Now, we re having that Debconf next year. It s almost hard to believe, not sure how I ll sleep tonight, we ve waited so long for this and we ve got a mountain of work ahead of us, but we ve got a strong team and I think Debconf 2016 attendees are in for a treat! Since I happened to live close to Montr al back in 2012, I supported the idea of a Debconf bid for Montr al first, and then for Cape Town afterwards. Little did I know then that the two cities would be the only two cities bidding against each other 3 years later. I think both cities are superb locations to host a Debconf, and I m supporting Montr al s bid for 2017. Want to get involved? We have a mailing list and IRC channel: #debconf16-capetown on oftc. Thanks again for all the great support from everyone involved so far!