What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Toolchain fixes

• Guillem Jover uploaded dpkg/1.18.0 which now uses an approximation to compute Installed-Size, making it indpendent from the underlying filesystem. It now always sort the Dpkg::Dist::Files files list on output to make the output stable with parallel builds.
• Lunar uploaded mozilla-devscripts/0.40 which told xpi-pack to skip saving extra zip attributes when making jar.
• Dominique Dumont uploaded libmodule-build-perl/0.421100-2 which makes the output deterministic. Original patch by Lunar.

Lunar rebased our custom dpkg on the new release, removing a now unneeded patch identified by Guillem Jover. An extra sort in the buildinfo generator prevented a stable order and was quickly fixed once identified. Mattia Rizzolo also rebased our custom debhelper on the latest release. Packages fixed The following 30 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: animal-sniffer, asciidoctor, autodock-vina, camping, cookie-monster, downthemall, flashblock, gamera, httpcomponents-core, https-finder, icedove-l10n, istack-commons, jdeb, libmodule-build-perl, libur-perl, livehttpheaders, maven-dependency-plugin, maven-ejb-plugin, mozilla-noscript, nosquint, requestpolicy, ruby-benchmark-ips, ruby-benchmark-suite, ruby-expression-parser, ruby-github-markup, ruby-http-connection, ruby-settingslogic, ruby-uuidtools, webkit2gtk, wot. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• aisleriot/1:3.16.2-1 uploaded by Andreas Henriksson, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• aws-sdk-for-php/2.8.5-1 by David Pr vot.
• bamtools/2.3.0+dfsg-3 uploaded by Andreas Tille, fix by Michael R. Crusoe.
• base-files/9.2 by Santiago Vila, some patches by Lunar.
• debian-keyring/2015.05.17 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• debram/2.0.0.2 by Thaddeus H. Black.
• dianara/1.3.0-2 by M nica Ram rez Arceda.
• gazebo/5.0.1+dfsg-1~exp1 by Jose Luis Rivero.
• glassfish/1:2.1.1-b31g+dfsg1-3 uploaded by Emmanuel Bourg, original patch by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• lcdproc/0.5.7-3 by Dominique Dumont.
• libalien-sdl-perl/1.446-2 by Dominique Dumont.
• libvirt-python/1.2.15-1 uploaded by Guido G nther, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxmpcore-java/5.1.2-3 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• pdb2pqr/2.0.0+dfsg-1 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• puredata/0.46.6-2 by Paul Brossier.
• qt-gstreamer/1.2.0-2 by Diane Trout.
• socat/1.7.3.0-1 uploaded by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Lunar.
• swaks/20130209.0-5 by Andreas Metzler, some patches by Chris Lamb.
• tf/1:4.0s1-19 by Jan Niehusmann.
• unzip/6.0-17 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Lunar.
• yorick/2.2.04+dfsg1-2 by by Thibaut Paumard.
• zip/3.0-10 by Santiago Vila, some patches by Chris Lamb.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• bible-kjv/4.27 uploaded by Matthew Vernon, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• calendar/2.04-1 by St phane Glondu.
• cupt/2.9.0 uploaded by Eugene V. Lyubimkin, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• dactyl/1.2~hg7166-1 uploaded by Michael Schutte, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• ghc/7.10.1-5 by Joachim Breitner.
• icedove/38.0~b5-1 by Carsten Schoenert.
• jd/1:2.8.9-150226-2 by Hideki Yamane.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-2 by intrigeri.
• winswitch/0.12.21+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.

Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet:

• #775531 on console-setup by Reiner Herrmann: update and split patch written in January.
• #785535 on maradns by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as build date.
• #785549 on dist by Reiner Herrmann: set hostname and domainname to predefined value.
• #785583 on s5 by Juan Picca: set timezone to UTC when unzipping files.
• #785617 on python-carrot by Juan Picca: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #785774 on afterstep by Juan Picca: modify documentation generator to allow a build date to be set instead of the current time, then use latest entry in debian/changelog as reference.
• #786508 on ttyload by Juan Picca: remove timestamp from documentation.
• #786568 on linux-minidisc by Lunar: use latest entry in debian/changelog as build date.
• #786615 on kfreebsd-10 by Steven Chamberlain: make order of file in source tarballs stable.
• #786633 on webkit2pdf by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #786634 on libxray-scattering-perl by Reiner Herrmann: tell Storable::nstore to produce sorted output.
• #786637 on nvidia-settings by Lunar: define DATE, WHOAMI, andHOSTNAME_CMD to stable values.
• #786710 on armada-backlight by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #786711 on leafpad by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #786714 on equivs by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.

Also, the following bugs have been reported:

• #785536 on maradns by Reiner Herrmann: unreproducible deadwood binary.
• #785624 on doxygen by Christoph Berg: timestamps in manpages generated makes builds non-reproducible.
• #785736 on git-annex by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: documentation should be made reproducible.
• #786593 on wordwarvi by Holger Levsen: please provide a --distrobuild build switch.
• #786601 on sbcl by Holger Levsen: FTBFS when locales-all is installed instead of locales.
• #786669 on ruby-celluloid by Holger Levsen: tests sometimes fail, causing ftbfs sometimes.
• #786743 on obnam by Holger Levsen: FTBFS.

reproducible.debian.net Holger Levsen made several small bug fixes and a few more visible changes:

• For packages in testing, comparisions will be done using the sid version of debbindiff.
• The scheduler will now schedule old packages from sid twice often as the ones in testing as we care more about the former at the moment.
• More statistics are now visible and the layout has been improved.
• Variations between the first and second build are now explained on the statistics page.

strip-nondeterminism Version 0.007-1 of strip-nondeterminism the tool to post-process various file formats to normalize them has been uploaded by Holger Levsen. Version 0.006-1 was already in the reproducible repository, the new version mainly improve the detection of Maven's pom.properties files. debbindiff development At the request of Emmanuel Bourg, Reiner Herrmann added a comparator for Java .class files. Documentation update Christoph Berg created a new page for the timestamps in manpages created by Doxygen. Package reviews 93 obsolete reviews have been removed, 76 added and 43 updated this week. New identified issues: timestamps in manpages generated by Doxygen, modification time differences in files extracted by unzip, tstamp task used in Ant build.xml, timestamps in documentation generated by ASDocGen. The description for build id related issues has been clarified. Meetings Holger Levsen announced a first meeting on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015, 19:00 UTC. The agenda is amendable on the wiki. Misc. Lunar worked on a proof-of-concept script to import the build environment found in .buildinfo files to UDD. Lucas Nussbaum has positively reviewed the proposed schema. Holger Levsen cleaned up various experimental toolchain repositories, marking merged brances as such.

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jeffrey Ratcliffe (jjr)
• Deepak Tripathi (deepak)
• Michael Schutte (michi)
• Ansgar Burchardt (ansgar)
• Salvatore Bonaccorso (carnil)

Congratulations!

I did some work on kbd today. I basically took an old Debian patch, the only significant divergence from the original tarball, and altered it in a way that I can read and understand it more easily (so I can send it upstream in good conscience). This process naturally involved a lot of errors. As I m talking about loadkeys here, they became unpleasantly obvious whenever I tested my code: First I messed up everything but plain printable ASCII characters (so the return key was mapped to Unicode U+0201 instead of the correct K(0x02, 0x01)), then I managed to completely freeze everything. In both cases, Alt+F7 was affected by the damage. Just like Ctrl+Alt+Del. Time for the good old boring elephants. I learn from mistakes when I make them twice, so a while sleep 60; do chvt 7; done loop saved me from further reboots. I nuked /dev/tty1 once more (in the really cool, irreversible way that disables all keypresses), but I could move on to the next VT. After a final adjustment, my modified patch finally worked. I sent it upstream, forgot about the troublesome debugging and went on to something else. Later in the evening, I decided to end the last school holidays in my life with a bit of instant messaging. BitlBee, a Jabber IRC gateway, is running on my virtual private server for this purpose. Being the occasional chatter that I am, I haven t touched it since the recent upgrade to Lenny. The format of its account configuration files has apparently changed, so I started to set up BitlBee anew. It kept telling me that there is an Authentication failure ; given the peculiar setup of the XMPP server I use, this didn t really surprise me. But still, this thing had worked before. Perhaps I really got my password wrong? I haven t typed it for ages, BitlBee stored it for me. As the administrator of my Jabber server, I could easily reset my password to what I thought it was. BitlBee still refused to get past the identification stage. I decided to install Gajim, entered my account information and told it to connect. Gnah. One or the other Python exception caused an eternal stream of error dialogue boxes to appear simultaneously and steal my focus. I don t have a keyboard shortcut for xkill and I couldn t type anything in a Urxvt (error message #54321 would receive the keystrokes). Ctrl+Alt+F1, get me out of here! Oh, right, I broke that one! At that point, I burst into a laugh. Somewhere in this post, there are a few bugs to report.

Bastian, You could also have a look at console-setup. In your case, installing it would be sufficient to get the desired result: it depends on console-terminus and uses it in its default configuration. Another benefit is ckbcomp, an xkbcomp clone for the console which is absolutely cool if you use some obscure keyboard layout which doesn t come with an up-to-date Linux console keymap. Just dpkg-reconfigure (or set XKBLAYOUT and friends in /etc/default/console-setup) and let the setupcon script do everything for you.

• PGF (some examples): A TeX macro package for generating pretty graphics, from the same brilliant author who freed me from PowerPoint and Impress. The user-oriented PGF frontend called TikZ is at least as enjoyable as the more traditional PSTricks and it plays together with both PostScript and PDF!
• Impressive: An OpenGL-based PDF viewer formerly known as keyjnote. Some of its features even make sense, the others are at least nice to watch.
• rlwrap: Readline instead of ^[[D.
• Byte.fm: A professional web radio station all around music. The presenters make this a definite recommendation for German-speaking people.

Wikipedia says:

Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world.

My home town of Innsbruck has been one of these cities since 29th August. I joined the movement for the third protest ride (de_AT) today to avoid the Hallowe en fuss, to have some fun, to get to know people, and out of personal conviction. Bicycling ludicrously slowly for a good hour, we managed to claim some fairly busy streets while many people tried to get home by car. A few of them attempted to get us out of their way by honking, but they gave up when they realized that our constant ringing and the music coming from the Soundcycle was louder than them. The hardest part was to get attention by pedestrians and drivers without interfering with buses and trams, but it worked most of the time. What s so great about Critical Mass is that it makes the participants experience just what they want to deliver: When there are more cyclists on the streets, every single one feels much safer, and motorists drive more carefully. I would usually avoid S dring at 5 p. m., but with an estimated fifty people around me, it is an entirely different matter. I also basically like the overall non-organisation of the trips: Whoever is at the top of the convoy can decide where it goes. Sadly, this spontaneity has its drawbacks: It briefly got us into the absurd situation of unlawfully using the street even though a cycle lane was available, which made our protest pointless for a few minutes. But a little room for improvement won t prevent me from taking part once more before the winter break.

At the end of every month, I check the catch-all mailbox for the domain of my class homepage to remove half a million of spam messages and see whether there are webmasterism-related mails in there (some people skip the Imprint section which spells out my true address). This time, I found a gem whose content can best be described as unsolicited commercial e-mail. It received some bonus points for not qualifying as bulk, so I decided to read it. In an early 2008 blog entry by a classmate of mine, he explains why he is fed up with how class photography was handled last school year. Someone at an Austrian company has apparently read the rant which they, as pointed out at the beginning of their mail, found hilarious. They happily join in bashing the company criticised in the post, then submit an offer. They pick some random student who has coincidentally written about the topic of class photography, and submit an offer. They didn t even bother to find out which school the student they thought they were writing to actually attends, let alone trying to contact the people in charge. Needless to say, the message is text/html. It is addressed to my classmate s Jabber ID. They misspelt it.

Tomorrow, a long bus ride to the capital of the Czech Republic will set off the last trip together with my high school classmates before the final exams in spring. We are to leave half an hour past 6am local time; I m surprised to find that my alarm watch can be configured to get on my nerves at five o clock in the morning. Until Friday, instead of connectivity I will have medieval buildings and woozy-for-some-reason teenagers all around me, so please don t expect me to reply to mails before Saturday. I ve been really looking forward to these holidays for weeks (hint: the school year started a fortnight ago). So glad they re finally here! PS: I m going to miss the party, so allow me to pre-congratulate 500000-submitter and the prospective winner of the contest. Cheers!

Jumping on a leaving bandwagon: How about krabbe, kaviar, safran, hummer, schnecke, wachtelei Readers who get this are most likely Austrians.

In today s episode of Tatort, a German-language TV series Martin blogged about some time ago, I had to laugh at this line:

You are a computer scientist, aren t you? What we ve got here is an equation with two variables. You certainly know that this easy to solve.

Interestingly, the same mistake can be found in an older episode of another German TV series called Der Bulle von T lz. A part of a dialogue between a detective and a teacher went like this:

Detective: Was she a good student?
Teacher: Not at all. She even cannot solve a simple equation with two variables.

Dear screenwriters, when in doubt, please stay away from maths. And while we re at it, there is no need for fingerprint matching software to show every fingerprint from the database on the screen and emit lots of short beeps while doing that. Your programmes are more enjoyable without this stuff. Update: As this post has triggered responses: First, I do not deny the overall quality of Tatort it is a great series. Second, of course there are systems of equations with more variables than equations which can be solved. But these aren t straightforward and certainly not what the people I m talking about had in mind

Do not

• listen to great (the ah, here comes my favourite passage kind of great) music,
• follow an interesting discussion on IRC,
• think about an important mail and
• try to code

at the same time, half an hour past midnight.

pid = os.fork()
pin, pout = os.pipe()

It just took me five minutes to figure out why these processes don t talk to each other. I m going to bed now.

Thanks to Anton Zinoviev, http://planet.debian.org/ is subscribed to my feed for months already, but I ve never gotten around to actually post something. So let s start in accordance with tradition! My name is Michael Schutte and I m yet another Debianist from Innsbruck, Austria. I have been around since about February, and I currently maintain kbd, python-odtwriter, and libgit-ruby. Then, I participate in the Debian/Ruby Extras team. I also contribute some QA work when time allows I even managed to fix an ugly security bug in an orphaned package once. I ll try to write down things here every once in a while (without breaking Planet too often).