Search Results: "Philip Hands"

10 September 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: /usr-merge updates, Salsa CI progress, DebConf23 lead-up, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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.

/usr-merge work, by Helmut Grohne, et al. Given that we now have consensus on moving forward by moving aliased files from / to /usr, we will also run into the problems that the file move moratorium was meant to prevent. The way forward is detecting them early and applying workarounds on a per-package basis. Said detection is now automated using the Debian Usr Merge Analysis Tool. As problems are reported to the bug tracking system, they are connected to the reports if properly usertagged. Bugs and patches for problem categories DEP17-P2 and DEP17-P6 have been filed. After consensus has been reached on the bootstrapping matters, debootstrap has been changed to swap the initial unpack and merging to avoid unpack errors due to pre-existing links. This is a precondition for having base-files install the aliasing symbolic links eventually. It was identified that the root filesystem used by the Debian installer is still unmerged and a change has been proposed. debhelper was changed to recognize systemd units installed to /usr. A discussion with the CTTE and release team on repealing the moratorium has been initiated.

Salsa CI work, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n August was a busy month in the Salsa CI world. Santiago reviewed and merged a bunch of MRs that have improved the project in different aspects: The aptly job got two MRs from Philip Hands. With the first one, the aptly now can export a couple of variables in a dotenv file, and with the second, it can include packages from multiple artifact directories. These MRs bring the base to improve how to test reverse dependencies with Salsa CI. Santiago is working on documenting this. As a result of the mass bug filing done in August, Salsa CI now includes a job to test how a package builds twice in a row. Thanks to the MRs of Sebastiaan Couwenberg and Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues. Last but not least, Santiago helped Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues to complete the support for arm64-only pipelines.

DebConf23 lead-up, by Stefano Rivera Stefano wears a few hats in the DebConf organization and in the lead up to the conference in mid-September, they ve all been quite busy. As one of the treasurers of DebConf 23, there has been a final budget update, and quite a few payments to coordinate from Debian s Trusted Organizations. We try to close the books from the previous conference at the next one, so a push was made to get DebConf 22 account statements out of TOs and record them in the conference ledger. As a website developer, we had a number of registration-related tasks, emailing attendees and trying to estimate numbers for food and accommodation. As a conference committee member, the job was mostly taking calls and helping the local team to make decisions on urgent issues. For example, getting conference visas issued to attendees required getting political approval from the Indian government. We only discovered the full process for this too late to clear some complex cases, so this required some hard calls on skipping some countries from the application list, allowing everyone else to get visas in time. Unfortunate, but necessary.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Rapha l Hertzog updated gnome-shell-extension-hamster to a new upstream git snapshot that is compatible with GNOME Shell 44 that was recently uploaded to Debian unstable/testing. This extension makes it easy to start/stop tracking time with Hamster Time Tracker. Very handy for consultants like us who are billing their work per hour.
  • Rapha l also updated zim to the latest upstream release (0.74.2). This is a desktop wiki that can be very useful as a note-taking tool to build your own personal knowledge base or even to manage your personal todo lists.
  • Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some uploads from mentors.debian.net.
  • Utkarsh helped the local team and the bursary team with some more DebConf activities and helped finalize the data.
  • Thorsten tried to update package hplip. Unfortunately upstream added some new compressed files that need to appear uncompressed in the package. Even though this sounded like an easy task, which seemed to be already implemented in the current debian/rules, the new type of files broke this implementation and made the package no longer buildable. The problem has been solved and the upload will happen soon.
  • Helmut sent 7 patches for cross build failures. Since dpkg-buildflags now defaults to issue arm64-specific compiler flags, more care is needed to distinguish between build architecture flags and host architecture flags than previously.
  • Stefano pushed the final bit of the tox 4 transition over the line in Debian, allowing dh-python and tox 4 to migrate to testing. We got caught up in a few unusual bugs in tox and the way we run it in Debian package building (which had to change with tox 4). This resulted in a couple of patches upstream.
  • Stefano visited Haifa, Israel, to see the proposed DebConf 24 venue and meet with the local team. While the venue isn t committed yet, we have high hopes for it.

7 October 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2022

Welcome to the September 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick 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. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
David A. Wheeler reported to us that the US National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have released a document called Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Developers (PDF). As David remarked in his post to our mailing list, it expressly recommends having reproducible builds as part of advanced recommended mitigations . The publication of this document has been accompanied by a press release.
Holger Levsen was made aware of a small Microsoft project called oss-reproducible. Part of, OSSGadget, a larger collection of tools for analyzing open source packages , the purpose of oss-reproducible is to:
analyze open source packages for reproducibility. We start with an existing package (for example, the NPM left-pad package, version 1.3.0), and we try to answer the question, Do the package contents authentically reflect the purported source code?
More details can be found in the README.md file within the code repository.
David A. Wheeler also pointed out that there are some potential upcoming changes to the OpenSSF Best Practices badge for open source software in relation to reproducibility. Whilst the badge programme has three certification levels ( passing , silver and gold ), the gold level includes the criterion that The project MUST have a reproducible build . David reported that some projects have argued that this reproducibility criterion should be slightly relaxed as outlined in an issue on the best-practices-badge GitHub project. Essentially, though, the claim is that the reproducibility requirement doesn t make sense for projects that do not release built software, and that timestamp differences by themselves don t necessarily indicate malicious changes. Numerous pragmatic problems around excluding timestamps were raised in the discussion of the issue.
Sonatype, a pioneer of software supply chain management , issued a press release month to report that they had found:
[ ] a massive year-over-year increase in cyberattacks aimed at open source project ecosystems. According to early data from Sonatype s 8th annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report, which will be released in full this October, Sonatype has recorded an average 700% jump in repository attacks over the last three years.
More information is available in the press release.
A number of changes were made to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including Chris Lamb adding a redirect from /projects/ to /who/ in order to keep old or archived links working [ ], Jelle van der Waa added a Rust programming language example for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH [ ][ ] and Mattia Rizzolo included Protocol Labs amongst our project-level sponsors [ ].

Debian There was a large amount of reproducibility work taking place within Debian this month:
  • The nfft source package was removed from the archive, and now all packages in Debian bookworm now have a corresponding .buildinfo file. This can be confirmed and tracked on the associated page on the tests.reproducible-builds.org site.
  • Vagrant Cascadian announced on our mailing list an informal online sprint to help clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing NMU (Non-Maintainer Uploads). The first such sprint took place on September 22nd with the following results:
    • Holger Levsen:
      • Mailed #1010957 in man-db asking for an update and whether to remove the patch tag for now. This was subsequently removed and the maintainer started to address the issue.
      • Uploaded gmp to DELAYED/15, fixing #1009931.
      • Emailed #1017372 in plymouth and asked for the maintainer s opinion on the patch. This resulted in the maintainer improving Vagrant s original patch (and uploading it) as well as filing an issue upstream.
      • Uploaded time to DELAYED/15, fixing #983202.
    • Vagrant Cascadian:
      • Verify and updated patch for mylvmbackup (#782318)
      • Verified/updated patches for libranlip. (#788000, #846975 & #1007137)
      • Uploaded libranlip to DELAYED/10.
      • Verified patch for cclive. (#824501)
      • Uploaded cclive to DELAYED/10.
      • Vagrant was unable to reproduce the underlying issue within #791423 (linuxtv-dvb-apps) and so the bug was marked as done .
      • Researched #794398 (in clhep).
    The plan is to repeat these sprints every two weeks, with the next taking place on Thursday October 6th at 16:00 UTC on the #debian-reproducible IRC channel.
  • Roland Clobus posted his 13th update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. During the last month, Roland ensured that the live images are now automatically fed to openQA for automated testing after they have been shown to be reproducible. Additionally Roland asked on the debian-devel mailing list about a way to determine the canonical timestamp of the Debian archive. [ ]
  • Following up on last month s work on reproducible bootstrapping, Holger Levsen filed two bugs against the debootstrap and cdebootstrap utilities. (#1019697 & #1019698)
Lastly, 44 reviews of Debian packages were added, 91 were updated and 17 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated too, including the descriptions of cmake_rpath_contains_build_path [ ], nondeterministic_version_generated_by_python_param [ ] and timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode [ ]. Furthermore, two new issue types were created: build_path_used_to_determine_version_or_package_name [ ] and captures_build_path_via_cmake_variables [ ].

Other distributions In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.

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 222 and 223 to Debian, as well as made the following changes:
  • The cbfstools utility is now provided in Debian via the coreboot-utils package so we can enable that functionality within Debian. [ ]
  • Looked into Mach-O support.
  • Fixed the try.diffoscope.org service by addressing a compatibility issue between glibc/seccomp that was preventing the Docker-contained diffoscope instance from spawning any external processes whatsoever [ ]. I also updated the requirements.txt file, as some of the specified packages were no longer available [ ][ ].
In addition Jelle van der Waa added support for file version 5.43 [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo updated the packaging:
  • Also include coreboot-utils in the Build-Depends and Test-Depends fields so that it is available for tests. [ ]
  • Use pep517 and pip to load the requirements. [ ]
  • Remove packages in Breaks/Replaces that have been obsoleted since the release of Debian bullseye. [ ]

Reprotest reprotest is our end-user tool to build the same source code twice in widely and deliberate different environments, and checking whether the binaries produced by the builds have any differences. This month, reprotest version 0.7.22 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen, which included the following changes by Philip Hands:
  • Actually ensure that the setarch(8) utility can actually execute before including an architecture to test. [ ]
  • Include all files matching *.*deb in the default artifact_pattern in order to archive all results of the build. [ ]
  • Emit an error when building the Debian package if the Debian packaging version does not patch the Python version of reprotest. [ ]
  • Remove an unneeded invocation of the head(1) utility. [ ]

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:

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, however, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add a job to build reprotest from Git [ ] and use the correct Git branch when building it [ ].
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Enable syncing of results from building live Debian ISO images. [ ]
    • Use scp -p in order to preserve modification times when syncing live ISO images. [ ]
    • Apply the shellcheck shell script analysis tool. [ ]
    • In a build node wrapper script, remove some debugging code which was messing up calling scp(1) correctly [ ] and consquently add support to use both scp -p and regular scp [ ].
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Track and handle the case where the Debian archive gets updated between two live image builds. [ ]
    • Remove a call to sudo(1) as it is not (or no longer) required to delete old live-build results. [ ]

Contact As ever, 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 2005

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: Why use Debian in commercial environments?

Philip Hands says it all