Search Results: "Luca Boccassi"

1 May 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in April 2024

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

10 May 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DEP-17, Debian Reimbursements Web App, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DEP-17 progress, by Helmut and Emilio We posted a proposal for modifying dpkg to better cope with directory aliasing. After an initial period of silence, the discussion took off, but was mostly diverted to a competing proposal by Luca Boccassi: Do not change dpkg at all, but still move all files affected by aliasing to their canonical location and thus removing the bad effects of aliasing. We facilitated this discussion and performed extensive analysis of this and competing proposals highlighting resulting problems and proposing solutions or workarounds. We performed a detailed analysis of how aliasing affects usage of dpkg-divert, dpkg-statoverride and update-alternatives. Details are available on the debian-dpkg mailinglist thread.

Debian Reimbursements Web App Progress, by Stefano Rivera In a project funded by Freexian s Project Funding initiative, Stefano made some more progress on the Debian Reimbursements Web App. The full workflow can now be exercised, completing the first milestone of the project, the Working Prototype.

DebConf Bursary Team, by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh started to prep the bursary team work, gearing up for DebConf, happening in India in September 2023. To learn more about the bursaries team, head to https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebConf/Bursaries. For learning how to apply for bursaries, visit https://debconf23.debconf.org/about/bursaries.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano attended several DebConf planning meetings, and did some work on the DebConf 23 website.
  • Stefano updated distro-info-data to include the release date of Debian bullseye, and added the next Ubuntu release, Mantic Minotour. This required a round of updates to all the stable releases, LTS, and ELTS.
  • Helmut sent patches for 13 cross build failures and filed 104 RC bugs for missing Breaks and Replaces.

11 November 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2022

Welcome to the Reproducible Builds report for October 2022! In these reports we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Our in-person summit this year was held in the past few days in Venice, Italy. Activity and news from the summit will therefore be covered in next month s report!
A new article related to reproducible builds was recently published in the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Titled Taxonomy of Attacks on Open-Source Software Supply Chains and authored by Piergiorgio Ladisa, Henrik Plate, Matias Martinez and Olivier Barais, their paper:
[ ] proposes a general taxonomy for attacks on opensource supply chains, independent of specific programming languages or ecosystems, and covering all supply chain stages from code contributions to package distribution.
Taking the form of an attack tree, the paper covers 107 unique vectors linked to 94 real world supply-chain incidents which is then mapped to 33 mitigating safeguards including, of course, reproducible builds:
Reproducible Builds received a very high utility rating (5) from 10 participants (58.8%), but also a high-cost rating (4 or 5) from 12 (70.6%). One expert commented that a reproducible build like used by Solarwinds now, is a good measure against tampering with a single build system and another claimed this is going to be the single, biggest barrier .
It was noticed this month that Solarwinds published a whitepaper back in December 2021 in order to:
[ ] illustrate a concerning new reality for the software industry and illuminates the increasingly sophisticated threats made by outside nation-states to the supply chains and infrastructure on which we all rely.
The 12-month anniversary of the 2020 Solarwinds attack (which SolarWinds Worldwide LLC itself calls the SUNBURST attack) was, of course, the likely impetus for publication.
Whilst collaborating on making the Cyrus IMAP server reproducible, Ellie Timoney asked why the Reproducible Builds testing framework uses two remarkably distinctive build paths when attempting to flush out builds that vary on the absolute system path in which they were built. In the case of the Cyrus IMAP server, these happened to be: Asked why they vary in three different ways, Chris Lamb listed in detail the motivation behind to each difference.
On our mailing list this month:
The Reproducible Builds project is delighted to welcome openEuler to the Involved projects page [ ]. openEuler is Linux distribution developed by Huawei, a counterpart to it s more commercially-oriented EulerOS.

Debian Colin Watson wrote about his experience towards making the databases generated by the man-db UNIX manual page indexing tool:
One of the people working on [reproducible builds] noticed that man-db s database files were an obstacle to [reproducibility]: in particular, the exact contents of the database seemed to depend on the order in which files were scanned when building it. The reporter proposed solving this by processing files in sorted order, but I wasn t keen on that approach: firstly because it would mean we could no longer process files in an order that makes it more efficient to read them all from disk (still valuable on rotational disks), but mostly because the differences seemed to point to other bugs.
Colin goes on to describe his approach to solving the problem, including fixing various fits of internal caching, and he ends his post with None of this is particularly glamorous work, but it paid off .
Vagrant Cascadian announced on our mailing list another online sprint to help clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). The first such sprint took place on September 22nd, but another was held on October 6th, and another small one on October 20th. This resulted in the following progress:
41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 62 were updated and 12 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too. [1][ ]
Lastly, Luca Boccassi submitted a patch to debhelper, a set of tools used in the packaging of the majority of Debian packages. The patch addressed an issue in the dh_installsysusers utility so that the postinst post-installation script that debhelper generates the same data regardless of the underlying filesystem ordering.

Other distributions F-Droid is a community-run app store that provides free software applications for Android phones. This month, F-Droid changed their documentation and guidance to now explicitly encourage RB for new apps [ ][ ], and FC Stegerman created an extremely in-depth issue on GitLab concerning the APK signing block. You can read more about F-Droid s approach to reproducibility in our July 2022 interview with Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid Project. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.

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:

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 224 and 225 to Debian:
  • Add support for comparing the text content of HTML files using html2text. [ ]
  • Add support for detecting ordering-only differences in XML files. [ ]
  • Fix an issue with detecting ordering differences. [ ]
  • Use the capitalised version of Ordering consistently everywhere in output. [ ]
  • Add support for displaying font metadata using ttx(1) from the fonttools suite. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Temporarily allow the stable-po pipeline to fail in the CI. [ ]
    • Rename the order1.diff test fixture to json_expected_ordering_diff. [ ]
    • Tidy the JSON tests. [ ]
    • Use assert_diff over get_data and an manual assert within the XML tests. [ ]
    • Drop the ALLOWED_TEST_FILES test; it was mostly just annoying. [ ]
    • Tidy the tests/test_source.py file. [ ]
Chris Lamb also added a link to diffoscope s OpenBSD packaging on the diffoscope.org homepage [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo fix an test failure that was occurring under with LLVM 15 [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Run the logparse tool to analyse results on the Debian Edu build logs. [ ]
  • Install btop(1) on all nodes running Debian. [ ]
  • Switch Arch Linux from using SHA1 to SHA256. [ ]
  • When checking Debian debstrap jobs, correctly log the tool usage. [ ]
  • Cleanup more task-related temporary directory names when testing Debian packages. [ ][ ]
  • Use the cdebootstrap-static binary for the 2nd runs of the cdebootstrap tests. [ ]
  • Drop a workaround when testing OpenWrt and coreboot as the issue in diffoscope has now been fixed. [ ]
  • Turn on an rm(1) warning into an info -level message. [ ]
  • Special case the osuosl168 node for running Debian bookworm already. [ ][ ]
  • Use the new non-free-firmware suite on the o168 node. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo made the following changes:
  • Ensure that 2nd build has a merged /usr. [ ]
  • Only reconfigure the usrmerge package on Debian bookworm and above. [ ]
  • Fix bc(1) syntax in the computation of the percentage of unreproducible packages in the dashboard. [ ][ ][ ]
  • In the index_suite_ pages, order the package status to be the same order of the menu. [ ]
  • Pass the --distribution parameter to the pbuilder utility. [ ]
Finally, Roland Clobus continued his work on testing Live Debian images. In particular, he extended the maintenance script to warn when workspace directories cannot be deleted. [ ]
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 June 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2022

Welcome to the May 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Repfix paper Zhilei Ren, Shiwei Sun, Jifeng Xuan, Xiaochen Li, Zhide Zhou and He Jiang have published an academic paper titled Automated Patching for Unreproducible Builds:
[..] fixing unreproducible build issues poses a set of challenges [..], among which we consider the localization granularity and the historical knowledge utilization as the most significant ones. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel approach [called] RepFix that combines tracing-based fine-grained localization with history-based patch generation mechanisms.
The paper (PDF, 3.5MB) uses the Debian mylvmbackup package as an example to show how RepFix can automatically generate patches to make software build reproducibly. As it happens, Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch for the mylvmbackup package which has remained unapplied by the Debian package maintainer for over seven years, thus this paper inadvertently underscores that achieving reproducible builds will require both technical and social solutions.

Python variables Johannes Schauer discovered a fascinating bug where simply naming your Python variable _m led to unreproducible .pyc files. In particular, the types module in Python 3.10 requires the following patch to make it reproducible: 
--- a/Lib/types.py
+++ b/Lib/types.py
@@ -37,8 +37,8 @@ _ag = _ag()
 AsyncGeneratorType = type(_ag)
 
 class _C:
-    def _m(self): pass
-MethodType = type(_C()._m)
+    def _b(self): pass
+MethodType = type(_C()._b)
Simply renaming the dummy method from _m to _b was enough to workaround the problem. Johannes bug report first led to a number of improvements in diffoscope to aid in dissecting .pyc files, but upstream identified this as caused by an issue surrounding interned strings and is being tracked in CPython bug #78274.

New SPDX team to incorporate build metadata in Software Bill of Materials SPDX, the open standard for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), is continuously developed by a number of teams and committees. However, SPDX has welcomed a new addition; a team dedicated to enhancing metadata about software builds, complementing reproducible builds in creating a more secure software supply chain. The SPDX Builds Team has been working throughout May to define the universal primitives shared by all build systems, including the who, what, where and how of builds:
  • Who: the identity of the person or organisation that controls the build infrastructure.
  • What: the inputs and outputs of a given build, combining metadata about the build s configuration with an SBOM describing source code and dependencies.
  • Where: the software packages making up the build system, from build orchestration tools such as Woodpecker CI and Tekton to language-specific tools.
  • How: the invocation of a build, linking metadata of a build to the identity of the person or automation tool that initiated it.
The SPDX Builds Team expects to have a usable data model by September, ready for inclusion in the SPDX 3.0 standard. The team welcomes new contributors, inviting those interested in joining to introduce themselves on the SPDX-Tech mailing list.

Talks at Debian Reunion Hamburg Some of the Reproducible Builds team (Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo, Roland Clobus, Philip Rinn, etc.) met in real life at the Debian Reunion Hamburg (official homepage). There were several informal discussions amongst them, as well as two talks related to reproducible builds. First, Holger Levsen gave a talk on the status of Reproducible Builds for bullseye and bookworm and beyond (WebM, 210MB): Secondly, Roland Clobus gave a talk called Reproducible builds as applied to non-compiler output (WebM, 115MB):

Supply-chain security attacks This was another bumper month for supply-chain attacks in package repositories. Early in the month, Lance R. Vick noticed that the maintainer of the NPM foreach package let their personal email domain expire, so they bought it and now controls foreach on NPM and the 36,826 projects that depend on it . Shortly afterwards, Drew DeVault published a related blog post titled When will we learn? that offers a brief timeline of major incidents in this area and, not uncontroversially, suggests that the correct way to ship packages is with your distribution s package manager .

Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a process for building software tools progressively from a primitive compiler tool and source language up to a full Linux development environment with GCC, etc. This is important given the amount of trust we put in existing compiler binaries. This month, a bootstrappable mini-kernel was announced. Called boot2now, it comprises a series of compilers in the form of bootable machine images.

Google s new Assured Open Source Software service Google Cloud (the division responsible for the Google Compute Engine) announced a new Assured Open Source Software service. Noting the considerable 650% year-over-year increase in cyberattacks aimed at open source suppliers, the new service claims to enable enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows . The announcement goes on to enumerate that packages curated by the new service would be:
  • Regularly scanned, analyzed, and fuzz-tested for vulnerabilities.
  • Have corresponding enriched metadata incorporating Container/Artifact Analysis data.
  • Are built with Cloud Build including evidence of verifiable SLSA-compliance
  • Are verifiably signed by Google.
  • Are distributed from an Artifact Registry secured and protected by Google.
(Full announcement)

A retrospective on the Rust programming language Andrew bunnie Huang published a long blog post this month promising a critical retrospective on the Rust programming language. Amongst many acute observations about the evolution of the language s syntax (etc.), the post beings to critique the languages approach to supply chain security ( Rust Has A Limited View of Supply Chain Security ) and reproducibility ( You Can t Reproduce Someone Else s Rust Build ):
There s some bugs open with the Rust maintainers to address reproducible builds, but with the number of issues they have to deal with in the language, I am not optimistic that this problem will be resolved anytime soon. Assuming the only driver of the unreproducibility is the inclusion of OS paths in the binary, one fix to this would be to re-configure our build system to run in some sort of a chroot environment or a virtual machine that fixes the paths in a way that almost anyone else could reproduce. I say almost anyone else because this fix would be OS-dependent, so we d be able to get reproducible builds under, for example, Linux, but it would not help Windows users where chroot environments are not a thing.
(Full post)

Reproducible Builds IRC meeting The minutes and logs from our May 2022 IRC meeting have been published. In case you missed this one, our next IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday 28th June at 15:00 UTC on #reproducible-builds on the OFTC network.

A new tool to improve supply-chain security in Arch Linux kpcyrd published yet another interesting tool related to reproducibility. Writing about the tool in a recent blog post, kpcyrd mentions that although many PKGBUILDs provide authentication in the context of signed Git tags (i.e. the ability to verify the Git tag was signed by one of the two trusted keys ), they do not support pinning, ie. that upstream could create a new signed Git tag with an identical name, and arbitrarily change the source code without the [maintainer] noticing . Conversely, other PKGBUILDs support pinning but not authentication. The new tool, auth-tarball-from-git, fixes both problems, as nearly outlined in kpcyrd s original blog post.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 212, 213 and 214 to Debian unstable. Chris also made the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for extracting vmlinuz Linux kernel images. [ ]
    • Support both python-argcomplete 1.x and 2.x. [ ]
    • Strip sticky etc. from x.deb: sticky Debian binary package [ ]. [ ]
    • Integrate test coverage with GitLab s concept of artifacts. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t mask differences in .zip or .jar central directory extra fields. [ ]
    • Don t show a binary comparison of .zip or .jar files if we have observed at least one nested difference. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Substantially update comment for our calls to zipinfo and zipinfo -v. [ ]
    • Use assert_diff in test_zip over calling get_data with a separate assert. [ ]
    • Don t call re.compile and then call .sub on the result; just call re.sub directly. [ ]
    • Clarify the comment around the difference between --usage and --help. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Test --help and --usage. [ ]
    • Test that --help includes the file formats. [ ]
Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool reference xb-tool for GNU Guix [ ] as well as updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix itself [ ][ ][ ].

Distribution work In Debian, 41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 85 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated, including adding a new nondeterministic_ordering_in_deprecated_items_collected_by_doxygen toolchain issue [ ] as well as ones for mono_mastersummary_xml_files_inherit_filesystem_ordering [ ], extended_attributes_in_jar_file_created_without_manifest [ ] and apxs_captures_build_path [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian performed a rough check of the reproducibility of core package sets in GNU Guix, and in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his usual monthly reproducible builds status report.

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:

Reproducible builds website Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation in a number of small ways, but also prepared and published an interview with Jan Nieuwenhuizen about Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Tim Jones added a link to the Talos Linux project [ ] and billchenchina fixed a dead link [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add support for detecting running kernels that require attention. [ ]
    • Temporarily configure a host to support performing Debian builds for packages that lack .buildinfo files. [ ]
    • Update generated webpages to clarify wishes for feedback. [ ]
    • Update copyright years on various scripts. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Provide a facility so that Debian Live image generation can copy a file remotely. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Add initial support for testing generated images with OpenQA. [ ]
And finally, as usual, node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ].

Misc news On our mailing list this month:

Contact 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:

2 November 2017

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2017)

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!

14 March 2016

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2016)

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!

9 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 28 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Chris Lamb filled a bug on python-setuptools with a patch to make the generated requires.txt files reproducible. The patch has been forwarded upstream. Chris also understood why the she-bang in some Python scripts kept being undeterministic: setuptools as called by dh-python could skip re-installing the scripts if the build had been too fast (under one second). #804339 offers a patch fixing the issue by passing --force to setup.py install. #804141 reported on gettext asks for support of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in gettextize. Santiago Vila pointed out that it doesn't felt appropriate as gettextize is supposed to be an interactive tool. The problem reported seems to be in avahi build system instead. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: celestia, dsdo, fonts-taml-tscu, fte, hkgerman, ifrench-gut, ispell-czech, maven-assembly-plugin, maven-project-info-reports-plugin, python-avro, ruby-compass, signond, thepeg, wagon2, xjdic. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb closed a wrongly reopened bug against haskell-devscripts that was actually a problem in haddock. reproducible.debian.net FreeBSD tests are now run for three branches: master, stable/10, release/10.2.0. (h01ger) diffoscope development Support has been added for Free Pascal unit files (.ppc). (Paul Gevers) The homepage is now available using HTTPS, thanks to Let's Encrypt!. Work has been done to be able to publish diffoscope on the Python Package Index (also known as PyPI): the tlsh module is now optional, compatibility with python-magic has been added, and the fallback code to handle RPM has been fixed. Documentation update Reiner Herrmann, Paul Gevers, Niko Tyni, opi, and Dhole offered various fixes and wording improvements to the reproducible-builds.org. A mailing-list is now available to receive change notifications. NixOS, Guix, and Baserock are featured as projects working on reproducible builds. Package reviews 70 reviews have been removed, 74 added and 17 updated this week. Chris Lamb opened 22 new fail to build from source bugs. New issues this week: randomness_in_ocaml_provides, randomness_in_qdoc_page_id, randomness_in_python_setuptools_requires_txt, gettext_creates_ChangeLog_files_and_entries_with_current_date. Misc. h01ger and Chris Lamb presented Beyond reproducible builds at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge on November 8th. They gave an overview of where we stand and the changes in user tools, infrastructure, and development practices that we might want to see happening. Feedback on these thoughts are welcome. Slides are already available, and the video should be online soon. At the same event, a meeting happened with some members of the release team to discuss the best strategy regarding releases and reproducibility. Minutes have been posted on the Debian reproducible-builds mailing-list.