Search Results: "mckinstry"

10 November 2022

Alastair McKinstry: Government approves T&Cs for first offshore wind auction under the ...

Government approves T&Cs for first offshore wind auction under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme ORESS 1 expected to secure 2.5GW of electricity generating capacity #GreensInGovernment The Government has today approved the Terms and Conditions of ORESS 1, the first auction for offshore wind under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme. This is a seminal moment in the delivery of offshore wind in Ireland. The offshore auction, the first in Ireland's history, is expected to provide a route to market for up to 2.5GW of offshore renewable energy to the Irish grid, enough to power 2.5 million Irish homes with clean electricity. Coming during the weeks of COP27, publishing details of the auction sends a strong international signal that Ireland is serious about offshore energy and our national climate targets and obligations. Recognising the critical role of local hosting communities in the development of this critical infrastructure, all offshore wind projects developed via ORESS will be required to make Community Benefit Fund contributions, from construction phase and continuing for the duration of the support period, typically for a total period of 25 years. This will result in lasting, tangible benefits for these communities. Speaking about this development, Minister Ryan said: The publication of these ORESS 1 Terms and Conditions is another massive step forward for offshore wind, for Irish climate leadership and towards Ireland s future as an international green energy hub. The first stage of this transformative auction will start before Christmas and it sets us on a path to powering many more of our homes and businesses from our own green energy resources over the coming years. It follows the enactment of the Maritime Area Planning Act last year, and the announcement regarding the awarding of Maritime Area Consents to Phase One projects last month. A final ORESS 1 auction calendar will be published by EirGrid shortly. The pre-qualification stage will launch next month (December). The qualification stage and the auction process will take place in the first half of 2023. Final auction results will be published by June 2023. Eligible projects Any project that has been awarded a Maritime Area Consent is eligible to partake in the ORESS 1 auction. Seven projects known as Relevant Projects were deemed ready to apply for Maritime Area Consents in Spring 2022. Once Maritime Area Consents are granted, these projects can not only compete for State support via the ORESS, but can also apply for planning permission from An Bord Plean la. Delivering on our broader targets ORESS 1 is expected to procure approximately 2.5GW of electricity generating capacity. Further auctions will be required to meet our renewable energy and climate ambitions. At least three offshore energy auctions are currently planned for this decade. The aim is to progress enough viable offshore projects through the consenting system to have competitive auctions. This will ultimately drive down cost for electricity consumers.

4 November 2022

Alastair McKinstry: 1.3 billion announced for new Forestry Support

1.3 billion announced for new Forestry Support Funds to be delivered through new Forestry Programme Premiums for planting trees to be increased by between 46% and 66% and extended to 20 years for farmers #GreensInGovernment The Taoiseach, Miche l Martin TD, Minister of State with responsibility for Forestry, Senator Pippa Hackett, and Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue T.D today announced a proposed investment by the Government of 1.3 billion in Irish forestry. The funding will be for the next national Forestry Programme and represents the largest ever investment by an Irish Government in tree-planting. The programme will now be the subject of state-aid approval by the European Commission. The Taoiseach said: This commitment by the Government to such a substantial financial package reflects the seriousness with which we view the climate change and biodiversity challenges, which affect all of society. Forestry is at the heart of delivering on our sustainability goals and strong support is needed to encourage engagement from all our stakeholders in reaching our objectives. Minister Hackett said: I m delighted to have secured a package of 1.318 billion for forestry. This will support the biggest and best-funded Forestry Programme ever in Ireland. It comes at an appropriate time, given the urgency of taking climate mitigation measures. Planting trees is one of the most effective methods of tackling climate change as well as contributing to improved biodiversity and water quality. One of my main aims is to re-engage farmers in afforestation. I m delighted therefore to be proposing a new 20-year premium term exclusively for farmers, as well as introducing a new small-scale native woodland scheme which will allow farmers to plant up to 1 hectare of native woodland on farmland and along watercourses outside of the forestry licensing process. Minister McConalogue said: Today we commit to providing unprecedented incentives to encourage the planting of trees that can provide a valuable addition to farm income and help to meet national climate and biodiversity objectives. This funding guarantees continued payments to those forest owners who planted under the current scheme and who are still in receipt of premiums. It also offers new and improved financial supports to those who undertake planting and sustainable forest management under the new Programme. We intend to increase premiums for planting trees by between 46% and 66% and to extend the premium period from 15 to 20 years for farmers. "We are approaching a new and exciting period for forestry in Ireland. The new Forestry Programme will drive a new and brighter future for forestry, for farmers and for our climate. The proposed new Forestry Programme is currently out to public consultation as part of the Strategic Environmental Assessment and Appropriate Assessment process. The Programme is the main implementation mechanism for the new Forest Strategy (2023 -2030) which reflects the ambitions contained in the recently published Shared National Vision for Trees, Woods and Forests in Ireland until 2050. The public consultation closes on 29th November, 2022 and any changes which result from this process will be incorporated into the Programme and the Forest Strategy. Minister Hackett commented: The draft Forestry Programme and Forest Strategy are the product of extensive stakeholder consultation and feedback, and both documents are open to public consultation for the next number of weeks. I would strongly encourage all interested parties to engage with the consultation in advance of the Strategy and Programme being finalised. The new Programme is built around the principle of right trees in the right places for the right reasons with the right management. It aims to deliver more diverse forest which will meet multiple societal objectives, economic, social and environmental. Higher grant rates for forest establishment are also proposed with increases of approximately 20% to reflect rising living costs. The new one hectare native tree area scheme will also make it easier for landowners who wish to plant small areas of trees on their farm. The Taoiseach concluded I welcome this milestone and I believe that this funding injection will be an important catalyst in delivering on the ambition outlined in the new Forest Strategy. Our environmental challenges are huge but so is our commitment to overcoming them and this Forestry Programme is key to delivering so many of our priorities. The new Programme will be 100% Exchequer funded and is subject to State Aid approval from the EU Commission. The Department is in contact with the Commission in relation to this approval which is a rigorous process.

3 November 2022

Alastair McKinstry: New Planning and Environment Court will reform planning appeals pro...

New Planning and Environment Court will reform planning appeals process #GreensInGovernment The Green Party has fulfilled an important Programme for Government commitment following the cabinet's decision to establish a new division of the High Court to specialise in environmental and planning issues. This is a major reform that will allow planning law to operate in a more efficient and environmentally friendly manner. Steven Matthews TD, Green Party Spokesperson for Planning and Local Government, explained the aim of the new court; The goal is to ensure that our judicial system has the capacity to decide cases as quickly as possible within a growing and increasingly complex body of Irish and EU environmental law. Timely access to justice is a cornersto ne of the effective rule of law and an international legal commitment Ireland has entered under the Aarhus Convention. This is extremely pressing given the urgent need to ease the pressure on the housing system and develop the infrastructure we need to transition to a zero-carbon economy." The Green Party is committed to ensuring the new Court will have the resources to fulfil its role. The Government will pass new legislation to allow the number of judges to be increased and provide the necessary exchequer funding to pay for these judges. The new Court will hear all the cases currently taken by the High Court s Commercial Planning and Strategic Infrastructure Development List and other major environmental cases. This is likely to include all major infrastructure cases as well as many cases relating to EU Environmental Law such as Environmental Impact Assessment, Strategic Environmental Assessment, Birds/Habitats, the Water Framework Directive and the Industrial Emissions Directive.

Alastair McKinstry: Department of Education confirms 12,544 Ukrainian pupils currently ...

Department of Education confirms 12,544 Ukrainian pupils currently enrolled in Irish schools #GreensInGovernment The Department of Education can confirm that as of 1 November, 12,544 Ukrainian pupils have been enrolled in schools across Ireland. Out of that figure, 7,948 of these pupils have been accommodated in primary schools while 4,596 pupils have enrolled in post-primary schools. To assist with the transition of Ukrainian refugees and their families into Irish schools Regional Education and Language Teams (REALT) continue to operate, hosted by the 16 regional education and training boards around Ireland and staffed by regionally based education support personnel.
These teams are ensuring that clear, accessible information flows are in place between schools, local education support services and national support structures in relation to people arriving from Ukraine. Information for parents in Ukrainian and Russian on accessing school places is available on gov.ie/Ukraine. The Department will continue to publish figures on the enrolment of Ukrainian children each month.

31 October 2022

Alastair McKinstry: An Bord Plean la conceded that the N6 Galway City Ring Road was in ...

An Bord Plean la conceded that the N6 Galway City Ring Road was in contravention with the National Climate Action plan.
In planning for how we adapt to and mitigate climate change, the UN IPCC AR6 report summarised the state of research globally and modelled nearly 3000 scenarios. The scenarios that kept us below 2 degrees of warming (our Paris agreement commitments) overwhelmingly depended on a move away from car-dependent societies and relied on car-free cities. This report was signed off by every world government. All EU and national modelling agrees. Accordingly our national Climate Action plan prepares for this global move from cars. It involves a reduction in car traffic, heavy investment in public transport and active travel (walking and cycling). This is essential as the research shows this works, and takes up to 84% less energy for transport in cities. The N6GCRR plan ignored this, and assumed an increase in car traffic of up to 49%. It in practice would have locked in car dependency when we don t expect there to be enough materials (lithium, etc for batteries) or energy to support that number of cars.
Across Europe and the world we have seen how to move from cars in cities: rail, reliable bus services with dedicated bus corridors; safe, segregated cycle lanes, public space design that enables walking, cycling by keeping distances short the 15 minute city concept of having schools, shops, transport hubs less than 15 minutes from your door. From Paris, removing 40% of cars from the city, now removing a lane from the Peripherique (its ring road), to Korea where expressways in cities have been removed to improve traffic as part of its better design. In Ireland, Dublin has seen a 49% drop in peak-time traffic over recent decades with improved public transport and cycling. But in Galway we ve ignored all this: not a kilometre of segregated cycle lane added, as there has been an over 80% drop in pupils cycling to school since the 1980s, amplifying traffic as parents commute to drop them to school, making roads more dangerous. No bus route passes over the Quincentennial bridge. Rather than fix the traffic in Galway, a ring road would induce more traffic as the existing Bothar na dTreabh / Quincintennial bridge did; the current road opened up Knocknacarra for development; a new motorway to Barna would open up Barna for more development. This is zombie planning: a roads plan from the 1990s lives on, while our County Development Plan has moved the focus to creating new satellite towns in Ardaun and Garraun instead. When all new business wants to be on the East, the new developments need to be near them; new schools are being built on the East, not the West. Rail is being double-tracked to Oranmore (and on to Athenry) to provide commuter rail to Renmore and the growing towns. This reduces the demand for cross-city commuting. Active travel and public transport development in the city has been stalled awaiting the ring road. This needs to be implemented as quickly as possible. The bus corridor from Salthill (via the schools) to Oranmore (via the businesses at Ballybrit, Parkmore) needs to be completed; this will involve a bus lane on the bridge. The N6GCRR said this was impossible without a new bridge for cars; Dublin s experience with the quays shows otherwise. If we get a fraction of the drop Dublin has seen, the traffic problem will be solved, as shown when the schools are out for holidays. The NTA and Galway councils have been stuck in thinking from 30 years ago. They assume that traffic cannot be reduced, only added; the ABP inspector agreed, despite overwhelming evidence elsewhere. We need to implement what has been shown to work elsewhere as quickly as possible; the funding is in place but the will and vision to do so has been lacking.

9 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

3 July 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 61 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 19th and June 25th 2016. Media coverage GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Emil Velikov searched on IRC for hints on how to guarantee unique values during build to invalidate shader caches in Mesa, when also no VCS information is available. A possible solution is a timestamp, which is unique enough for local builds, but can still be reproducible by allowing it to be overwritten with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Packages fixed The following 9 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: cclib librun-parts-perl llvm-toolchain-snapshot python-crypto python-openid r-bioc-shortread r-bioc-variantannotation ruby-hdfeos5 sqlparse The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 139 reviews have been added, 20 have been updated and 21 have been removed in this week. New issues found: 53 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Mateusz ukasik. diffoscope development Quote of the week "My builds are so reproducible, they fail exactly every second time." Johannes Ziemke (@discordianfish) Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb (lamby), Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

21 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 60 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 12th and June 18th 2016: Media coverage GSoC and Outreachy updates Weekly reports by our participants: Toolchain fixes With this upload of texlive-bin we decided to stop keeping our patched fork of as most of the patches for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support had been integrated upstream already, and the last one (making FORCE_SOURCE_DATE default to 1) had been refused. So, we are now going to let the archive be rebuilt against unstable's texlive-bin and see how many packages will become unreproducible with this change; once enough data will be collected we will ponder whether FORCE_SOURCE_DATE should be exported by helper tools (such as debhelper) or manually exported by every package that needs it. (For those wondering: we still recommend to follow SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH always and don't recommend other projects to implement FORCE_SOURCE_DATE ) With the drop of texlive-bin we now have only three modified packages in our experimental repository. Reproducible work in other projects Packages fixed The following 12 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: django-floppyforms flask-restful hy jets3t kombu llvm-toolchain-3.8 moap python-bottle python-debtcollector python-django-debug-toolbar python-osprofiler stevedore The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads with reproducibility fixes that currently fail to build: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 36 reviews have been added, 12 have been updated and 31 have been removed in this week. 17 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Dominic Hargreaves. diffoscope development Satyam worked on argument completion (#826711) for diffoscope. strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.019-1~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. reprotest development Ceridwen filed an Intent To Package (ITP) bug for reprotest as #827293. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Mattia Rizzolo, Reiner Herrmann, Ed Maste and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

17 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 55 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 8th and May 14th 2016: Documentation updates Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 28 packages have become newly reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: actor-framework ask asterisk-prompt-fr-armelle asterisk-prompt-fr-proformatique coccinelle cwebx d-itg device-tree-compiler flann fortunes-es idlastro jabref konclude latexdiff libint minlog modplugtools mummer mwrap mxallowd mysql-mmm ocaml-atd ocamlviz postbooks pycorrfit pyscanfcs python-pcs weka The following 9 packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again due to changes in their build dependencies: csync2 dune-common dune-localfunctions libcommons-jxpath-java libcommons-logging-java libstax-java libyanfs-java python-daemon yacas The following packages have become newly reproducible after being fixed: The following packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 344 reviews have been added, 125 have been updated and 20 have been removed in this week. 14 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Dan Kegel sent a mail to report about his experiments with a reproducible dpkg PPA for Ubuntu. According to him sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dank/dpkg && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install dpkg should be enough to get reproducible builds on Ubuntu 16.04. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

10 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 54 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 1st and May 7th 2016: Media coverage There has been a surprising tweet last week: "Props to @FiloSottile for his nifty gvt golang tool. We're using it to get reproducible builds for a Zika & West Nile monitoring project." and to our surprise Kenn confirmed privately that he indeed meant "reproducible builds" as in "bit by bit identical builds". Wow. We're looking forward to learn more details about this; for now we just know that they are doing this for software quality reasons basically. Two of the four GSoC and Outreachy participants for Reproducible builds posted their introductions to Planet Debian: Toolchain fixes and other upstream developments dpkg 1.18.5 was uploaded fixing two bugs relevant to us: This upload made it necessary to rebase our dpkg on the version on sid again, which Niko Tyni and Lunar promptly did. Then a few days later 1.18.6 was released to fix a regression in the previous upload, and Niko promptly updated our patched version again. Following this Niko Tyni found #823428: "dpkg: many packages affected by dpkg-source: error: source package uses only weak checksums". Alexis Bienven e worked on tex related packages and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH: Emmanuel Bourg uploaded jflex/1.4.3+dfsg-2, which removes timestamps from generated files. Packages fixed The following 285 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies (mostly from GCC honouring SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, see the previous week report): 0ad abiword abcm2ps acedb acpica-unix actiona alliance amarok amideco amsynth anjuta aolserver4-nsmysql aolserver4-nsopenssl aolserver4-nssqlite3 apbs aqsis aria2 ascd ascii2binary atheme-services audacity autodocksuite avis awardeco bacula ballerburg bb berusky berusky2 bindechexascii binkd boinc boost1.58 boost1.60 bwctl cairo-dock cd-hit cenon.app chipw ckermit clp clustalo cmatrix coinor-cbc commons-pool cppformat crashmail crrcsim csvimp cyphesis-cpp dact dar darcs darkradiant dcap dia distcc dolphin-emu drumkv1 dtach dune-localfunctions dvbsnoop dvbstreamer eclib ed2k-hash edfbrowser efax-gtk efax exonerate f-irc fakepop fbb filezilla fityk flasm flightgear fluxbox fmit fossil freedink-dfarc freehdl freemedforms-project freeplayer freeradius fxload gdb-arm-none-eabi geany-plugins geany geda-gaf gfm gif2png giflib gifticlib glaurung glusterfs gnokii gnubiff gnugk goaccess gocr goldencheetah gom gopchop gosmore gpsim gputils grcompiler grisbi gtkpod gvpe hardlink haskell-github hashrat hatari herculesstudio hpcc hypre i2util incron infiniband-diags infon ips iptotal ipv6calc iqtree jabber-muc jama jamnntpd janino jcharts joy2key jpilot jumpnbump jvim kanatest kbuild kchmviewer konclude krename kscope kvpnc latexdiff lcrack leocad libace-perl libcaca libcgicc libdap libdbi-drivers libewf libjlayer-java libkcompactdisc liblscp libmp3spi-java libpwiz librecad libspin-java libuninum libzypp lightdm-gtk-greeter lighttpd linpac lookup lz4 lzop maitreya meshlab mgetty mhwaveedit minbif minc-tools moc mrtrix mscompress msort mudlet multiwatch mysecureshell nifticlib nkf noblenote nqc numactl numad octave-optim omega-rpg open-cobol openmama openmprtl openrpt opensm openvpn openvswitch owx pads parsinsert pcb pd-hcs pd-hexloader pd-hid pd-libdir pear-channels pgn-extract phnxdeco php-amqp php-apcu-bc php-apcu php-solr pidgin-librvp plan plymouth pnscan pocketsphinx polygraph portaudio19 postbooks-updater postbooks powertop previsat progressivemauve puredata-import pycurl qjackctl qmidinet qsampler qsopt-ex qsynth qtractor quassel quelcom quickplot qxgedit ratpoison rlpr robojournal samplv1 sanlock saods9 schism scorched3d scummvm-tools sdlbasic sgrep simh sinfo sip-tester sludge sniffit sox spd speex stimfit swarm-cluster synfig synthv1 syslog-ng tart tessa theseus thunar-vcs-plugin ticcutils tickr tilp2 timbl timblserver tkgate transtermhp tstools tvoe ucarp ultracopier undbx uni2ascii uniutils universalindentgui util-vserver uudeview vfu virtualjaguar vmpk voms voxbo vpcs wipe x264 xcfa xfrisk xmorph xmount xyscan yacas yasm z88dk zeal zsync zynaddsubfx Last week the 1000th bug usertagged "reproducible" was fixed! This means roughly 2 bugs per day since 2015-01-01. Kudos and huge thanks to everyone involved! Please also note: FTBFS packages have not been counted here and there are still 600 open bugs with reproducible patches provided. Please help bringing that number down to 0! The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads which fix reproducibility issues, but currently FTBFS: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 54 reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 18 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, James Cowgill and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development Thanks to Mattia, diffoscope 52~bpo8+1 is available in jessie-backports now. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC. Mattia also wrote a small ikiwiki macro for this blog to ease linking reproducible issues, packages in the package tracker and bugs in the Debian BTS.

2 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 53 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between April 24th and 30th 2016. Media coverage Reproducible builds were mentioned explicitly in two talks at the Mini-DebConf in Vienna: Aspiration together with the OTF CommunityLab released their report about the Reproducible Builds summit in December 2015 in Athens. Toolchain fixes Now that the GCC development window has been opened again, the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch by Dhole and Matthias Klose to address the issue timestamps_from_cpp_macros (__DATE__ / __TIME__) has been applied upstream and will be released with GCC 7. Following that Matthias Klose also has uploaded gcc-5/5.3.1-17 and gcc-6/6.1.1-1 to unstable with a backport of that SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch. Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven/3.3.9-4, which uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the maven.build.timestamp. (SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification) Other upstream changes Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch to Sphinx which extends SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support for copyright years in generated documentation. Packages fixed The following 12 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: hhvm jcsp libfann libflexdock-java libjcommon-java libswingx1-java mobile-atlas-creator not-yet-commons-ssl plexus-utils squareness svnclientadapter The following packages have became reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 95 reviews have been added, 15 have been updated and 129 have been removed in this week. 22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Martin Michlmayr. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Amongst the 29 interns who will work on Debian through GSoC and Outreachy there are four who will be contributing to Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software. We are very glad to welcome ceridwen, Satyam Zode, Scarlett Clark and Valerie Young and look forward to working together with them the coming months (and maybe beyond)! This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

8 February 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 41 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week:

Toolchain fixes After remarks from Guillem Jover, Lunar updated his patch adding generation of .buildinfo files in dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dracut, ent, gdcm, guilt, lazarus, magit, matita, resource-agents, rurple-ng, shadow, shorewall-doc, udiskie. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
  • disque/1.0~rc1-5 by Chris Lamb, noticed by Reiner Herrmann.
  • dlm/4.0.4-2 by Ferenc W gner.
  • drbd-utils/8.9.6-1 by Apollon Oikonomopoulos.
  • java-common/0.54 by by Emmanuel Bourg.
  • libjibx1.2-java/1.2.6-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
  • libzstd/0.4.7-1 by Kevin Murray.
  • python-releases/1.0.0-1 by Jan Dittberner.
  • redis/2:3.0.7-2 by Chris Lamb, noticed by Reiner Herrmann.
  • tetex-brev/4.22.github.20140417-3 by Petter Reinholdtsen.
Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:
  • anarchism/14.0-4 by Holger Levsen.
  • hhvm/3.11.1+dfsg-1 by Faidon Liambotis.
  • netty/1:4.0.34-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #813309 on lapack by Reiner Herrmann: removes the test log and sorts the files packed into the static library locale-independently.
  • #813345 on elastix by akira: suggest to use the $datetime placeholder in Doxygen footer.
  • #813892 on dietlibc by Reiner Herrmann: remove gzip headers, sort md5sums file, and sort object files linked in static libraries.
  • #813912 on git by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from documentation generated with asciidoc, remove gzip headers, and sort md5sums and tclIndex files.

reproducible.debian.net For the first time, we've reached more than 20,000 packages with reproducible builds for sid on amd64 with our current test framework. Vagrant Cascadian has set up another test system for armhf. Enabling four more builder jobs to be added to Jenkins. (h01ger)

Package reviews 233 reviews have been removed, 111 added and 86 updated in the previous week. 36 new FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb and Alastair McKinstry. New issue: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_yat2m. The description for the blacklisted_on_jenkins issue has been improved. Some packages are also now tagged with blacklisted_on_jenkins_armhf_only.

Misc. Steven Chamberlain gave an update on the status of FreeBSD and variants after the BSD devroom at FOSDEM 16. He also discussed how jails can be used for easier and faster reproducibility tests. The video for h01ger's talk in the main track of FOSDEM 16 about the reproducible ecosystem is now available.

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)

30 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 31 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch against debhelper to make dh_installinit source files in a stable order. Chris Lamb found how to make cython output deterministic by ordering the keys used to traverse a dict. Reiner Herrmann proposed a patch for pyside-tools to remove the timestamps embedded by rcc in the generated Python code. Mattia Rizzolo rebased our custom version of debhelper on version 9.20151126. As no objections have been made so far, Mattia Rizzolo has filled #805872 asking -Wdate-time to be turned on by default in dpkg-buildflag. Guillem has since sent a final warning before proceeding as such in the next dpkg upload. Russ Allbery added support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in podlators 4.00 which Niko Tyni intend to backport to Perl 5.22. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: fontforge, golang-github-tinylib-msgp, libpango-perl, libparanamer-java, libxaw, sqljet, stringtemplate4, uzbl, zope-mysqlda. 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: Lunar reported two issues making xz-utils unreproducible (#806328, #806331). reproducible.debian.net A seventh armhf build node has been added (resulting of two more armhf build jobs). Thanks to Vagrant Cascadian for putting this Raspberry Pi 2B to help. (h01ger) jenkins.debian.net has been made more robust against network and proxy failures. (h01ger) A new 100 GB partition has been set up on reproducible.debian.net to prevent disk space issues. Thanks to ProfitBricks for its continuous support to our continuous test system. (h01ger) New graphs showing usertagged bugs have been added on the dashboard to measure the progress without FTBFS issues. Please note that comparing the two graphs might be misleading as more than 1300 FTBFS bugs have been inventoried. (h01ger) Package reviews 78 reviews have been removed, 116 added and 49 updated this week. 25 new FTBFS have been filed by Chris West, Chris Lamb and Santiago Vila. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_documentation_generated_with_libwibble, copyright_year_in_documentation_generated_by_sphinx, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_glib_genpod, random_order_of_tmpfiles_in_postinst, random_order_in_cython_output, timestamps_in_python_code_generated_by_pyside. Reiner Herrmann and Lunar improved the prebuilder script: the script can now be called through a symlink, run parallel builds, calls diffoscope by its new name and ensure to install its recommends, and save the text output aside the HTML one. Reiner also added a script to lookup the last update of notes for a given package. Misc. Santiago Villa has been recently working on making sure that Arch:all packages were properly buildable by running dpkg-buildpackage -A. This uncovered a question that is probably not currently addressed by the policy: on which architectures should architecture-independent be buildable?

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.

27 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 26 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo created a bug report to continue the discussion on storing cryptographic checksums of the installed .deb in dpkg database. This follows the discussion that happened in June and is a pre-requisite to add checksums to .buildinfo files. Niko Tyni identified why the Vala compiler would generate code in varying order. A better patch than his initial attempt still needs to be written. Packages fixed The following 15 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alt-ergo, approx, bin-prot, caml2html, coinst, dokujclient, libapreq2, mwparserfromhell, ocsigenserver, python-cryptography, python-watchdog, slurm-llnl, tyxml, unison2.40.102, yojson. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: reproducible.debian.net pbuilder has been updated to version 0.219~bpo8+1 on all eight build nodes. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) Packages that FTBFS but for which no open bugs have been recorded are now tested again after 3 days. Likewise for depwait packages. (h01ger) Out of disk situations will not cause IRC notifications anymore. (h01ger) Documentation update Lunar continued to work on writing documentation for the future reproducible-builds.org website. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 81 added and 48 updated this week. Chris West and Chris Lamb identified 70 fail to build from source issues. Misc. h01ger presented the project in Mexico City at the 3er Congreso de Seguridad de la Informaci n where it became clear that we lack academic papers related to reproducible builds. Bryan has been doing hard work to improve reproducibility for OpenWrt. He wrote a report linking to the patches and test results he published.

18 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 25 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote a new patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Pod::Man. This would complement or replace the previously implemented POD_MAN_DATE environment variable in a more generic way. Niko Tyni proposed a fix to prevent mtime variation in directories due to debhelper usage of cp --parents -p. Packages fixed The following 119 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aac-tactics, aafigure, apgdiff, bin-prot, boxbackup, calendar, camlmix, cconv, cdist, cl-asdf, cli-common, cluster-glue, cppo, cvs, esdl, ess, faucc, fauhdlc, fbcat, flex-old, freetennis, ftgl, gap, ghc, git-cola, globus-authz-callout-error, globus-authz, globus-callout, globus-common, globus-ftp-client, globus-ftp-control, globus-gass-cache, globus-gass-copy, globus-gass-transfer, globus-gram-client, globus-gram-job-manager-callout-error, globus-gram-protocol, globus-gridmap-callout-error, globus-gsi-callback, globus-gsi-cert-utils, globus-gsi-credential, globus-gsi-openssl-error, globus-gsi-proxy-core, globus-gsi-proxy-ssl, globus-gsi-sysconfig, globus-gss-assist, globus-gssapi-error, globus-gssapi-gsi, globus-net-manager, globus-openssl-module, globus-rsl, globus-scheduler-event-generator, globus-xio-gridftp-driver, globus-xio-gsi-driver, globus-xio, gnome-control-center, grml2usb, grub, guilt, hgview, htmlcxx, hwloc, imms, kde-l10n, keystone, kimwitu++, kimwitu-doc, kmod, krb5, laby, ledger, libcrypto++, libopendbx, libsyncml, libwps, lprng-doc, madwimax, maria, mediawiki-math, menhir, misery, monotone-viz, morse, mpfr4, obus, ocaml-csv, ocaml-reins, ocamldsort, ocp-indent, openscenegraph, opensp, optcomp, opus, otags, pa-bench, pa-ounit, pa-test, parmap, pcaputils, perl-cross-debian, prooftree, pyfits, pywavelets, pywbem, rpy, signify, siscone, swtchart, tipa, typerep, tyxml, unison2.32.52, unison2.40.102, unison, uuidm, variantslib, zipios++, zlibc, zope-maildrophost. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Packages which could not be tested: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Lunar reported that test strings depend on default character encoding of the build system in ongl. reproducible.debian.net The 189 packages composing the Arch Linux core repository are now being tested. No packages are currently reproducible, but most of the time the difference is limited to metadata. This has already gained some interest in the Arch Linux community. An explicit log message is now visible when a build has been killed due to the 12 hours timeout. (h01ger) Remote build setup has been made more robust and self maintenance has been further improved. (h01ger) The minimum age for rescheduling of already tested amd64 packages has been lowered from 14 to 7 days, thanks to the increase of hardware resources sponsored by ProfitBricks last week. (h01ger) diffoscope development diffoscope version 37 has been released on October 15th. It adds support for two new file formats (CBFS images and Debian .dsc files). After proposing the required changes to TLSH, fuzzy hashes are now computed incrementally. This will avoid reading entire files in memory which caused problems for large packages. New tests have been added for the command-line interface. More character encoding issues have been fixed. Malformed md5sums will now be compared as binary files instead of making diffoscope crash amongst several other minor fixes. Version 38 was released two days later to fix the versioned dependency on python3-tlsh. strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.013-1 has been uploaded to the archive. It fixes an issue with nonconformant PNG files with trailing garbage reported by Roland Rosenfeld. disorderfs development disorderfs version 0.4.1-1 is a stop-gap release that will disable lock propagation, unless --share-locks=yes is specified, as it still is affected by unidentified issues. Documentation update Lunar has been busy creating a proper website for reproducible-builds.org that would be a common location for news, documentation, and tools for all free software projects working on reproducible builds. It's not yet ready to be published, but it's surely getting there. Homepage of the future reproducible-builds.org website Who's involved? page of the future reproducible-builds.org website Package reviews 103 reviews have been removed, 394 added and 29 updated this week. 72 FTBFS issues were reported by Chris West and Niko Tyni. New issues: random_order_in_static_libraries, random_order_in_md5sums.

14 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 20 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Motherboard published an article on the project inspired by the talk at the Chaos Communication 15. Journalists sadly rarely pick their headlines. The sensationalist How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA got started a few rants here and there. One from OpenBSD developper Ted Unangst lead to a good email contact and some thorough comments. Toolchain fixes The modified version of gettext has been removed from the experimental toolchain. Fixing individual package seems a better approach for now. Chris Lamb sent two patches for abi-compliance-checker: one to drop the timestamp from generated HTML reports and another to make umask and timestamps deterministic in the abi tarball. Bugs submitted by Dhole lead to a discussion on the best way to adapt pod2man now that we have SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specified. There is really a whole class of issues that are currently undiscovered waiting for tests running on a different date. This is likely to should happen soon. Chris Lamb uploaded a new version of debhelper in the reproducible repository, cherry-picking a fix for interactions between ddebs and udebs. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aspic, django-guardian, erlang-sqlite3, etcd, libnative-platform-java, mingw-ocaml, nose2, oar, obexftp, py3cairo, python-dugong, python-secretstorage, python-setuptools, qct, qdox, recutils, s3ql, wine. 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 configuration of all remote armhf and amd64 nodes in now finished. The remaining reproducibility tests running on the Jenkins host has been removed. armhf results and graphs are now visible in dashboard. We can now test the whole archive in 2-3 weeks using the current 12 amd64 jobs and 3 months using the current 6 armhf builders. We will be looking at improving the armhf sitation, maybe using more native systems or via arm64. (h01ger) The Jenkins UI is now more responsive since all jobs building packages have been moved to remote hosts. (h01ger) A new job has been added to collect information about build nodes to be included in the variation table. (h01ger) The currently scheduled page has been split for amd64 and armhf. They now give an overview (refreshed every minute, thanks to Chris Lamb) of the packages currently being tested. (h01ger) Several cleanup and bugfixes have been made, especially in the remote building and maintenance scripts. They should now be more robust against network problems. The automatic scheduler is now also run closer to when schroots and pbuilders are updated. (h01ger, mapreri) Package reviews 16 reviews have been removed, 54 added and 55 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed lc_messages_randomness with the more descriptive different_pot_creation_date_in_gettext_mo_files. New issues added this week: timestamps_in_reports_generated_by_abi_compliance_checker, umask_and_timestamp_variation_in_tgz_generated_by_abi_compliance_checker, and timestamps_added_by_blast2. 23 new FTBFS bugs have been filled by Chris Lamb, and Niko Tyni. Misc. Red Hat developper Mike McLean had a talk at Flock 2015 about reproducible builds in Koji. Slides and video recording are available. Koji is the build infrastructure used by Fedora, Red Hat and other distributions. It already keeps track of the environment used for a given build, so the required changes for handling the environment are smaller than the ones in Debian. Fedora is still missing a team effort to fix non-determinism in the package builds, but it is great to see Fedora moving forward.

15 August 2015

Simon Kainz: DUCK challenge: week 6

Well, here are the stats for week 6 of the DUCK challenge: So we had 9 packages fixed and uploaded by 7 different uploaders. A big "Thank You" to you!! Since the start of this challenge, a total of 68 packages, were fixed. Here is a quick overview:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7
# Packages 10 15 10 14 10 9 -
Total 10 25 35 49 59 68 -
The list of the fixed and updated packages is availabe here. I will try to update this ~daily. If I missed one of your uploads, please drop me a line. So, assuming that the current rate of packages fixed will be somewhat stable and there will be no additional regessions, the number of packages with issues should be down to 0 in about 209 weeks (~ 4 years ) I just arrived at DebConf15 in Heidelberg, and will try to find all of you who fixed & uploaded packages. If you are one of the guys and see me lingering around, please talk to me and get your lighter! The DUCK Challenge will run until the end of DebConf15, but as there might be some delay by my scripts detecting your upload, please contact my directly. Pevious articles are here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5.

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