Search Results: "rmh"

9 October 2024

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in September 2024

7 October 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2024

Welcome to the September 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our reports attempt to outline what we ve been up to over the past month, highlighting news items from elsewhere in tech where they are related. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. New binsider tool to analyse ELF binaries
  2. Unreproducibility of GHC Haskell compiler 95% fixed
  3. Mailing list summary
  4. Towards a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible OS
  5. Two new reproducibility-related academic papers
  6. Distribution work
  7. diffoscope
  8. Other software development
  9. Android toolchain core count issue reported
  10. New Gradle plugin for reproducibility
  11. Website updates
  12. Upstream patches
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

New binsider tool to analyse ELF binaries Reproducible Builds developer Orhun Parmaks z has announced a fantastic new tool to analyse the contents of ELF binaries. According to the project s README page:
Binsider can perform static and dynamic analysis, inspect strings, examine linked libraries, and perform hexdumps, all within a user-friendly terminal user interface!
More information about Binsider s features and how it works can be found within Binsider s documentation pages.

Unreproducibility of GHC Haskell compiler 95% fixed A seven-year-old bug about the nondeterminism of object code generated by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) received a recent update, consisting of Rodrigo Mesquita noting that the issue is:
95% fixed by [merge request] !12680 when -fobject-determinism is enabled. [ ]
The linked merge request has since been merged, and Rodrigo goes on to say that:
After that patch is merged, there are some rarer bugs in both interface file determinism (eg. #25170) and in object determinism (eg. #25269) that need to be taken care of, but the great majority of the work needed to get there should have been merged already. When merged, I think we should close this one in favour of the more specific determinism issues like the two linked above.

Mailing list summary On our mailing list this month:
  • Fay Stegerman let everyone know that she started a thread on the Fediverse about the problems caused by unreproducible zlib/deflate compression in .zip and .apk files and later followed up with the results of her subsequent investigation.
  • Long-time developer kpcyrd wrote that there has been a recent public discussion on the Arch Linux GitLab [instance] about the challenges and possible opportunities for making the Linux kernel package reproducible , all relating to the CONFIG_MODULE_SIG flag. [ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann followed-up to an in-person conversation at our recent Hamburg 2024 summit on the potential presence for Reproducible Builds in recognised standards. [ ]
  • Fay Stegerman also wrote about her worry about the possible repercussions for RB tooling of Debian migrating from zlib to zlib-ng as reproducibility requires identical compressed data streams. [ ]
  • Martin Monperrus wrote the list announcing the latest release of maven-lockfile that is designed aid building Maven projects with integrity . [ ]
  • Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote about potential role of reproducible builds in combatting silent data corruption, as detailed in a recent Tweet and scholarly paper on faulty CPU cores. [ ]

Towards a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible OS Bernhard M. Wiedemann began writing on journey towards a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible operating system on the openSUSE wiki:
This is a report of Part 1 of my journey: building 100% bit-reproducible packages for every package that makes up [openSUSE s] minimalVM image. This target was chosen as the smallest useful result/artifact. The larger package-sets get, the more disk-space and build-power is required to build/verify all of them.
This work was sponsored by NLnet s NGI Zero fund.

Distribution work In Debian this month, 14 reviews of Debian packages were added, 12 were updated and 20 were removed, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ] In addition, Holger opened 4 bugs against the debrebuild component of the devscripts suite of tools. In particular:
  • #1081047: Fails to download .dsc file.
  • #1081048: Does not work with a proxy.
  • #1081050: Fails to create a debrebuild.tar.
  • #1081839: Fails with E: mmdebstrap failed to run error.
Last month, an issue was filed to update the Salsa CI pipeline (used by 1,000s of Debian packages) to no longer test for reproducibility with reprotest s build_path variation. Holger Levsen provided a rationale for this change in the issue, which has already been made to the tests being performed by tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, this issue was closed by Santiago R. R., nicely explaining that build path variation is no longer the default, and, if desired, how developers may enable it again. In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading version 278 to Debian:
  • New features:
    • Add a helpful contextual message to the output if comparing Debian .orig tarballs within .dsc files without the ability to fuzzy-match away the leading directory. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Drop removal of calculated os.path.basename from GNU readelf output. [ ]
    • Correctly invert X% similar value and do not emit 100% similar . [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Temporarily remove procyon-decompiler from Build-Depends as it was removed from testing (via #1057532). (#1082636)
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
For trydiffoscope, the command-line client for the web-based version of diffoscope, Chris Lamb also:
  • Added an explicit python3-setuptools dependency. (#1080825)
  • Bumped the Standards-Version to 4.7.0. [ ]

Other software development disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into system calls to reliably flush out reproducibility issues. This month, version 0.5.11-4 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen making the following changes:
  • Replace build-dependency on the obsolete pkg-config package with one on pkgconf, following a Lintian check. [ ]
  • Bump Standards-Version field to 4.7.0, with no related changes needed. [ ]

In addition, reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, version 0.7.28 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen including a change by Jelle van der Waa to move away from the pipes Python module to shlex, as the former will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].

Android toolchain core count issue reported Fay Stegerman reported an issue with the Android toolchain where a part of the build system generates a different classes.dex file (and thus a different .apk) depending on the number of cores available during the build, thereby breaking Reproducible Builds:
We ve rebuilt [tag v3.6.1] multiple times (each time in a fresh container): with 2, 4, 6, 8, and 16 cores available, respectively:
  • With 2 and 4 cores we always get an unsigned APK with SHA-256 14763d682c9286ef .
  • With 6, 8, and 16 cores we get an unsigned APK with SHA-256 35324ba4c492760 instead.

New Gradle plugin for reproducibility A new plugin for the Gradle build tool for Java has been released. This easily-enabled plugin results in:
reproducibility settings [being] applied to some of Gradle s built-in tasks that should really be the default. Compatible with Java 8 and Gradle 8.3 or later.

Website updates There were a rather substantial number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

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:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In September, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Upgrade the osuosl4 node to Debian trixie in anticipation of running debrebuild and rebuilderd there. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarily mark the osuosl4 node as offline due to ongoing xfs_repair filesystem maintenance. [ ][ ]
    • Do not warn about (very old) broken nodes. [ ]
    • Add the risc64 architecture to the multiarch version skew tests for Debian trixie and sid. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Mark the virt 32,64 b nodes as down. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Add support for powercycling OpenStack instances. [ ]
    • Update the fail2ban to ban hosts for 4 weeks in total [ ][ ] and take care to never ban our own Jenkins instance. [ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian recorded a disk failure for the virt32b and virt64b nodes [ ], performed some maintenance of the cbxi4a node [ ][ ] and marked most armhf architecture systems as being back online.
Finally, 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:

10 September 2024

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in August 2024

4 September 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2024

Welcome to the August 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our reports attempt to outline what we ve been up to over the past month, highlighting news items from elsewhere in tech where they are related. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. LWN: The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds
  2. Intermediate Autotools build artifacts removed from PostgreSQL distribution tarballs
  3. Distribution news
  4. Mailing list news
  5. diffoscope
  6. Website updates
  7. Upstream patches
  8. Reproducibility testing framework

LWN: The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds The free software newspaper of record, Linux Weekly News, published an in-depth article based on Holger Levsen s talk, Reproducible Builds: The First Eleven Years which was presented at the recent DebConf24 conference in Busan, South Korea. Titled The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds and written by Jake Edge, LWN s article not only summarises Holger s talk and clarifies its message but it links to external information as well. Holger s original talk can also be watched on the DebConf24 webpage (direct .webm link and his HTML slides are available also). There are also a significant number of comments on LWN s page as well. Holger Levsen also headed a scheduled discussion session at DebConf24 on Preserving *other* build artifacts addressing a topic where a number of Debian packages are (or would like to) produce results that are neither the .deb files, the build logs nor the logs of CI tests. This is an issue for reproducible builds as this 4th type of build artifact are typically shipped within the binary .deb packages, and are invariably non-deterministic; thus making the .deb files unreproducible. (A direct .webm link and HTML slides are available).

Intermediate Autotools build artifacts removed from PostgreSQL distribution tarballs Peter Eisentraut wrote a detailed blog post on the subject of The new PostgreSQL 17 make dist . Like many projects, the PostgreSQL database has previously pre-built parts of its GNU Autotools build system: the reason for this is a mix of convenience and traditional practice . Peter astutely notes that this arrangement in the build system is quite tricky as:
You need to carefully maintain the different states of clean source code , partially built source code , and fully built source code , and the commands to transition between them.
However, Peter goes on to mention that:
a lot more attention is nowadays paid to the software supply chain. There are security and legal reasons for this. When users install software, they want to know where it came from, and they want to be sure that they got the right thing, not some fake version or some version of dubious legal provenance.
And cites the XZ Utils backdoor as a reason to care about transparent and reproducible ways of distributing and communicating a source tarball and provenance. Because of this, intermediate build artifacts are now henceforth essentially disallowed from PostgreSQL distribution tarballs.

Distribution news In Debian this month, 30 reviews of Debian packages were added, 17 were updated and 10 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. One issue type was added by Chris Lamb, too. [ ] In addition, an issue was filed to update the Salsa CI pipeline (used by 1,000s of Debian packages) to no longer test for reproducibility with reprotest s build_path variation. Holger Levsen provided a rationale for this change in the issue, which has already been made to the tests being performed by tests.reproducible-builds.org.
In Arch Linux this month, Jelle van der Waa published a short blog post on the topic of Investigating creating reproducible images with mkosi, motivated by the desire to make it possible for anyone to re-recreate the official Arch cloud image bit-by-bit identical on their own machine as per [the] reproducible builds definition. In addition, Jelle filed a patch for pacman, the Arch Linux package manager, to respect the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable when installing a package.
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.
In Android news, the IzzyOnDroid project added 49 new rebuilder recipes and now features 256 total reproducible applications representing 21% of the total offerings in the repository. IzzyOnDroid is an F-Droid style repository for Android apps[:] applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly GitHub).

Mailing list news From our mailing list this month:
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted a brief message to the list with some helpful information regarding nondeterminism within Rust binaries, positing the use of the codegen-units = 16 default and resulting in a bug being filed in the Rust issue tracker. [ ]
  • Bernhard also wrote to the list, following up to a thread in November 2023, on attempts to make the LibreOffice suite of office applications build reproducibly. In the thread from this month, Bernhard could announce that the four patches previously mentioned have landed in LibreOffice upstream.
  • Fay Stegerman linked the mailing list to a thread she made on the Signal issue tracker regarding whether device-specific binaries [can] ever be considered meaningfully reproducible . In particular: the whole part about allow[ing] multiple third parties to come to a consensus on a correct result breaks down completely when correct is device-specific and not something everyone can agree on. [ ]
  • Developer kpcyrd posted an update for source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. Announcing that it now importing packages from live-bootstrap ( a usable Linux system [that is] created with only human-auditable, and wherever possible, human-written, source code ) into its database of provenance data.
  • Lastly, Mechtilde Stehmann posted an update to an earlier thread about how Java builds are not reproducible on the armhf architecture, enquiring how they might gain temporary access to such a machine in order to perform some deeper testing. [ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb released versions 274, 275, 276 and 277, uploaded these to Debian, and made the following changes as well:
  • New features:
    • Strip ANSI escapes usually colour codes from the output of the Procyon Java decompiler. [ ]
    • Factor out a method for stripping ANSI escapes. [ ]
    • Append output from dumppdf(1) in more cases, avoiding situations where we fallback to a binary diff. [ ]
    • Add support for versions of Perl s IO::Compress::Zip version 2.212. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Also catch RuntimeError exceptions when importing the PyPDF library so that it, or, crucially, its transitive dependencies, cannot not cause diffoscope to traceback at runtime and build time. [ ]
    • Do not call marshal.load( ) of precompiled Python bytecode as it, alas, inherently unsafe. Replace for now with a brief summary of the code section of .pyc. [ ][ ]
    • Don t include excessive debug output when calling dumppdf(1). [ ]
  • Testsuite-related changes:
    • Don t bother to check version number in test_python.py: the fixture for this test is fixed. [ ][ ]
    • Update test_zip text fixtures and definitions to support new changes to the Perl IO::Compress library. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the available architectures for a number of test dependencies [ ] and Sergei Trofimovich fixed an issue to avoid diffoscope crashing when hashing directory symlinks [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian proposed GNU Guix updates for diffoscope versions 275 and 276 and 277.

Website updates There were a rather substantial number of improvements made to our website this month, including:
  • Alba Herrerias:
    • Substantially extend the guidance on the Contribute page. [ ]
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Set the future: true configuration value so we render all files and documents in the website, regardless of whether they have a date property in the future. After all, we don t re-generate the website on a timer, and have other ways of making unpublished, draft posts. [ ][ ]
  • Fay Stegerman:
  • hulkoba:
  • kpcyrd:
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Pol Dellaiera:

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:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Temporarily install the openssl-provider-legacy package for the Debian unstable environments for running diffoscope due to Debian bug #1078944. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Mark Debian armhf architecture nodes as being down due to proxy down. [ ][ ]
  • Detect proxy failures. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Run the index-buildinfo for the builtin-pho script with the -q switch. [ ]
  • Disable all Arch Linux reproducible jobs. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the website configuration to install the ruby-jekyll-sitemap package as it is now used in the website [ ], Roland Clobus updated the script to build Debian live images to treat openQA issues as warnings [ ], and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4b node as down [ ].
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:

12 July 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2024

Welcome to the June 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced
  2. GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility
  3. New reproducibility-related academic papers
  4. Misc development news
  5. Website updates
  6. Reproducibility testing framework

Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced We are very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility Vagrant Cascadian will be holding a Reproducible Builds session as part of the monthly Guix patch review series on July 11th at 17:00 UTC. These online events are intended to encourage everyone everyone becoming a patch reviewer and the goal of reviewing patches is to help Guix project accept contributions while maintaining our quality standards and learning how to do patch reviews together in a friendly hacking session.

Development news In Debian this month, 4 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 14 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Only one issue types was updated, though, explaining that we don t vary the build path anymore.
On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote that whilst he had previously collected issues that introduce non-determinism he has now moved on to discuss about mitigations , in the sense of how can we avoid whole categories of problem without patching an infinite number of individual packages . In addition, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen announced the release of two versions of GNU Mes. [ ][ ]
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.
In NixOS, with the 24.05 release out, it was again validated that our minimal ISO is reproducible by building it on a virtual machine with no access to the binary cache.
What s more, we continued to write patches in order to fix specific reproducibility issues, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann writing three patches (for qutebrowser, samba and systemd), Chris Lamb filing Debian bug #1074214 against the fastfetch package and Arnout Engelen proposing fixes to refind and for the Scala compiler [ .
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded two versions (270 and 271) to Debian, and made the following changes as well:
  • Drop Build-Depends on liblz4-tool in order to fix Debian bug #1072575. [ ]
  • Update tests to support zipdetails version 4.004 that is shipped with Perl 5.40. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Akihiro Suda very helpfully making the <h4> elements more distinguishable from the <h3> level [ ][ ] as well as adding a guide for Dockerfile reproducibility [ ]. In addition Fay Stegerman added two tools, apksigcopier and reproducible-apk-tools, to our Tools page.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Marking the virt(32 64)c-armhf nodes as down. [ ]
  • Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node in order to debug a regression on the ppc64el architecture. [ ]
  • Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo re-aligned the /etc/default/jenkins file with changes performed upstream [ ] and changed how configuration files are handled on the rb-mail1 host. [ ], whilst Vagrant Cascadian documented the failure of the virt32c and virt64c nodes after initial investigation [ ].
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:

10 July 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: YubiHSM packaging, unschroot, live-patching, and more! (by Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-06 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.

YubiHSM packaging, by Colin Watson Freexian is starting to use YubiHSM devices (hardware security modules) as part of some projects, and we wanted to have the supporting software directly in Debian rather than needing to use third-party repositories. Since Yubico publish everything we need under free software licences, Colin packaged yubihsm-connector, yubihsm-shell, and python-yubihsm from https://developers.yubico.com/, in some cases based partly on the upstream packaging, and got them all into Debian unstable. Backports to bookworm will be forthcoming once they ve all reached testing.

unschroot by Helmut Grohne Following an in-person discussion at MiniDebConf Berlin, Helmut attempted splitting the containment functionality of sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare into a dedicated tool interfacing with sbuild as a variant of --chroot-mode=schroot providing a sufficiently compatible interface. While this seemed technically promising initially, a discussion on debian-devel indicated a desire to rely on an existing container runtime such as podman instead of using another Debian-specific tool with unclear long term maintenance. None of the existing container runtimes meet the specific needs of sbuild, so further advancing this matter implies a compromise one way or another.

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is working on the development of linux live-patching for Debian. For the moment, this is in an exploratory phase, that includes how to handle the different patches that will need to be provided. kpatch could help significantly in this regard. However, kpatch was removed from unstable because there are some RC bugs affecting the version that was present in Debian unstable. Santiago packaged the most recent upstream version (0.9.9) and filed an Intent to Salvage bug. Santiago is waiting for an ACK by the maintainer, and will upload to unstable after July 10th, following the package salvaging rules. While kpatch 0.9.9 fixes the main issues, it still needs some work to properly support Debian and the Linux kernel versions packaged in our distribution. More on this in the report next month.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n The work by Santiago in Salsa CI this month includes a merge request to ease testing how the production images are built from the changes introduced by future merge requests. By default, the pipelines triggered by a merge request build a subset of the images built for production, to reduce the use of resources, and because most of the time the subset of staging images is enough to test the proposed modifications. However, sometimes it is needed to test how the full set of production images is built, and the above mentioned MR helps to do that. The changes include documentation, so hopefully this will make it easier to test future contributions. Also, for being able to include support for RISC-V, Salsa CI needs to replace kaniko as the tool used to build the images. Santiago tested buildah, but there are some issues when pushing built images for non-default platform architectures (i386, armhf, armel) to the container registry. Santiago will continue to work on this to find a solution.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera prepared updates for a number of Python modules.
  • Stefano uploaded the latest point release of Python 3.12 and the latest Python 3.13 beta. Both uncovered upstream regressions that had to be addressed.
  • Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf 24.
  • Stefano helped SPI to reconcile their financial records for DebConf 23.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 36 packages to new upstream versions (including fixes for four CVEs in python-aiohttp), fixing RC bugs in ipykernel, ipywidgets, khard, and python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, and packaging zope.deferredimport which was needed for a new upstream version of python-persistent.
  • Colin removed the user_readenv option from OpenSSH s PAM configuration (#1018260), and prepared a release note.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cups.
  • Nicholas Skaggs updated xmacro to support reproducible builds (#1014428), DEP-3 and DEP-5 compatibility, along with utilizing hardening build flags. Helmut supported and uploaded package.
  • As a result of login having become non-essential, Helmut uploaded debvm to unstable and stable and fixed a crossqa.debian.net worker.
  • Santiago worked on the Content Team activities for DebConf24. Together with other DebConf25 team members, Santiago wrote a document for the head of the venue to describe the project of the conference.

22 June 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: And the Stars Will Sing

Review: And the Stars Will Sing, by Michelle Browne
Series: The Meaning Wars #1
Publisher: Michelle Browne
Copyright: 2012, 2021
Printing: 2021
ASIN: B0075G7GEA
Format: Kindle
Pages: 85
And the Stars Will Sing is a self-published science fiction novella, the first of a (currently) five book series. I believe it may be Browne's first publication, although I don't have a good data source to confirm. Crystal Weiss is a new graduate from Mars, about to leave the solar system to her first job assignment: installation of a permanent wormhole in the vicinity of Messier 14. Her expertise is the placement calculations. The heavy mathematical lifting is of course done by computers, but humans have to do the mapping and some of the guidance. And the Stars Will Sing is an epistolary novel, told in the form of her letters to her friend Sarah. I feel bad when I stumble across a book like this. I want to stick with my habit of writing a review of each book I read, but it's one thing to pan a bad book by a famous author and another thing to pick on a self-published novella that I read due to some recommendation or mention whose details I've forgotten. Worse, I think this wasn't even the recommended book; I looked up the author, saw that the first of a series was on sale, and thought "oh, hey, I like epistolary novels and I'm in the mood for some queer space opera." This book didn't seem that queer (there is a secondary lesbian relationship but the main relationship seemed rather conventional), but I'll get to the romance in a moment. I was not the reader for this book. There's a reason why most of the books I read are from traditional publishers; I'm too critical of a reader for a lot of early self-published work. It's not that I dislike self-publishing as a concept many self-published books are excellent and the large publishers have numerous problems but publishers enforce a quality bar. Inconsistently, unfairly, and by rejecting a lot of good work, but still, they do. I'm fairly sure traditional publishers would have passed on this book; the quality of the writing isn't there yet. (It's certainly a better book than I could have written! But that's why I'm writing my reviews over in my quiet corner of the Internet and not selling fiction to other people.) The early chapters aren't too bad, although they have a choppy, cliched style that more writing experience usually smoothes out. The later chapters have more dialogue, enough that I started wondering how Crystal could remember that much dialogue verbatim to put into a letter, and it's not good. All of the characters talk roughly the same (even the aliens), the dialogue felt even more cliched than the rest of the writing, and I started getting distracted by the speech tags. Crystal comes across as very young, impulsive, and a drama magnet who likes being all up in her coworkers' business. None of these are objective flaws in the book, but I could tell early on that I was going to find her annoying. She has a heavily-foreshadowed enemies-to-lovers thing with one of her male coworkers. Her constant complaining about him at the start of the story was bad enough, but the real problem is that in the very few places where he has more personality than plastic lawn furniture, he's being obnoxious to Crystal. I'm used to being puzzled by a protagonist's choice in love interests, but this one felt less like an odd personality choice and more a lack of writing skill. Even if the relationship is being set up for failure (not true by the end of this book), you've got to help me understand what the protagonist saw in him or was getting out of the relationship. The plot was so predictable that it ironically surprised me. I was sure that some sort of twist or complication was coming, but no. I will give Browne some credit for writing a slightly more realistic character reaction to violence than most SF authors, but there was nothing in the plot to hold my interest. The world-building was generic science fiction with aliens. It had a few glimmers of promise, but there was some sort of psychic hand-waving involved in siting wormholes that didn't work for me and the plot climax made no sense to me whatsoever. This is the kind of bad book that I don't want to hold against the writer. Twelve years later and with numerous other novels and novellas under her belt, her writing is probably much better. I do think this book would have benefited from an editor telling her it wasn't good enough for publication yet, but that's not how the Kindle self-publishing world works. Mostly, this is my fault: I half-followed a recommendation into an area of publishing that I know from past experience I should avoid without a solid review from an equally critical reader. Followed by The Stolen, a two-story collection. Rating: 3 out of 10

8 June 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in May 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 347 and rejected 49 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 348.

Debian LTS This was my hundred-nineteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also continued to work on tiff and last but not least did a week of FD and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Unfortunately I used lots of time to debug an issue with nghttp2. Please see my odyssey below. Debian ELTS This month was the seventieth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: For some tests I installed the new nghttp2 package on my Stretch VM and started the daemon. Unfortunately I got an unexpected error from getaddrinfo() about ai_socktype not supported. The daemon was configured to listen on lo, the device was available, but the error remained. I was pretty sure that my patch was not the reason for this and indeed the unpatched version showed this error as well. I didn t want to release an untested package, so nghttp2 had to start at least! Therefore I built a minimal example to reproduce the issue. getaddrinfo() failed for hints.ai_socktype=SOCK_STREAM and a numerical IP address. Having no hints at all or localhost instead of 127.0.0.1 made the error disappear (as a remark: localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1, the ipv6 variant is ip6-localhost ). I could see that in nghttp2 as well. Configuring it with localhost let the error vanish but the daemon still exited due to other reasons. After some time of debugging, I added another network interface to my VM and configured it with a dummy IPv4 address. Voila, everything worked as expected. According to Wikipedia, IPv6 was ratified as standard in 2017 and Stretch was also released in 2017. No wonder that a IPv6-only-VM had problems back then and these problems survived to the present. I also continued to work on an update for tiff in Jessie and Stretch, did a week of FD and attended the LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom Due to more and more problems with time_t, I removed osmo-iuh and all dependencies from armel, armhf and i386, sorry. If there is really anybody using this software on 32-bit architectures don t hesitate to get in touch. It is official now, the GSoC student working on the Mobcom packages is Nathan Doris. He already finished the hardest part of the job and I could upload the latest version of libosmocore. I really enjoy working with him and look forward to a pleasant SoC :-). misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Did I already mention that I love lists with topics I can work on. I print out such lists and enjoy checking off one after the other. End of May Helmut told me that I am a bit lazy and gave me such a list with all my packages that have one or the other issue with /usr-move. Most of the uploads above are packages on that list and I could check off a lot :-).

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2024

Welcome to the May 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. A peek into build provenance for Homebrew
  2. Distribution news
  3. Mailing list news
  4. Miscellaneous news
  5. Two new academic papers
  6. diffoscope
  7. Website updates
  8. Upstream patches
  9. Reproducibility testing framework

A peek into build provenance for Homebrew Joe Sweeney and William Woodruff on the Trail of Bits blog wrote an extensive post about build provenance for Homebrew, the third-party package manager for MacOS. Their post details how each bottle (i.e. each release):
[ ] built by Homebrew will come with a cryptographically verifiable statement binding the bottle s content to the specific workflow and other build-time metadata that produced it. [ ] In effect, this injects greater transparency into the Homebrew build process, and diminishes the threat posed by a compromised or malicious insider by making it impossible to trick ordinary users into installing non-CI-built bottles.
The post also briefly touches on future work, including work on source provenance:
Homebrew s formulae already hash-pin their source artifacts, but we can go a step further and additionally assert that source artifacts are produced by the repository (or other signing identity) that s latent in their URL or otherwise embedded into the formula specification.

Distribution news In Debian this month, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (aka josch) noticed that the Debian binary package bash version 5.2.15-2+b3 was uploaded to the archive twice. Once to bookworm and once to sid but with differing content. This is problem for reproducible builds in Debian due its assumption that the package name, version and architecture triplet is unique. However, josch highlighted that
This example with bash is especially problematic since bash is Essential:yes, so there will now be a large portion of .buildinfo files where it is not possible to figure out with which of the two differing bash packages the sources were compiled.
In response to this, Holger Levsen performed an analysis of all .buildinfo files and found that this needs almost 1,500 binNMUs to fix the fallout from this bug. Elsewhere in Debian, Vagrant Cascadian posted about a Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU) sprint to take place during early June, and it was announced that there is now a #debian-snapshot IRC channel on OFTC to discuss the creation of a new source code archiving service to, perhaps, replace snapshot.debian.org. Lastly, 11 reviews of Debian packages were added, 15 were updated and 48 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated by Chris Lamb as well. [ ][ ]
Elsewhere in the world of distributions, deep within a larger announcement from Colin Percival about the release of version 14.1-BETA2, it was mentioned that the FreeBSD kernels are now built reproducibly.
In Fedora, however, the change proposal mentioned in our report for April 2024 was approved, so, per the ReproduciblePackageBuilds wiki page, the add-determinism tool is now running in new builds for Fedora 41 ( rawhide ). The add-determinism tool is a Rust program which, as its name suggests, adds determinism to files that are given as input by attempting to standardize metadata contained in binary or source files to ensure consistency and clamping to $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in all instances . This is essentially the Fedora version of Debian s strip-nondeterminism. However, strip-nondeterminism is written in Perl, and Fedora did not want to pull Perl in the buildroot for every package. The add-determinism tool eliminates many causes of non-determinism and work is ongoing to continue the scope of packages it can operate on.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month, regular contributor kpcyrd wrote to the list with an update on their source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. The whatsrc.org project, which was launched last month in response to the XZ Utils backdoor, now contains and indexes almost 250,000 unique source code archives. In their post, kpcyrd gives an example of its intended purpose, noting that it shown that whilst there seems to be consensus about [the] source code for zsh 5.9 in various Linux distributions, it does not align with the contents of the zsh Git repository . Holger Levsen also posted to the list with a pre-announcement of sorts for the 2024 Reproducible Builds summit. In particular:
[Whilst] the dates and location are not fixed yet, however if you don help us with finding a suitable location soon, it is very likely that we ll meet again in Hamburg in the 2nd half of September 2024 [ ].
Lastly, Frederic-Emmanuel Picca wrote to the list asking for help understanding the non-reproducible status of the Debian silx package and received replies from both Vagrant Cascadian and Chris Lamb.

Miscellaneous news strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. This month strip-nondeterminism version 1.14.0-1 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb chiefly to incorporate a change from Alex Muntada to avoid a dependency on Sub::Override to perform monkey-patching and break circular dependencies related to debhelper [ ]. Elsewhere in our tooling, Jelle van der Waa modified reprotest because the pipes module will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].
It was also noticed that a new blog post by Daniel Stenberg detailing How to verify a Curl release mentions the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable. This is because:
The [curl] release tools document also contains another key component: the exact time stamp at which the release was done using integer second resolution. In order to generate a correct tarball clone, you need to also generate the new version using the old version s timestamp. Because the modification date of all files in the produced tarball will be set to this timestamp.

Furthermore, Fay Stegerman filed a bug against the Signal messenger app for Android to report that their reproducible builds cannot, in fact, be reproduced. However, Fay is quick to note that she has:
found zero evidence of any kind of compromise. Some differences are yet unexplained but everything I found seems to be benign. I am disappointed that Reproducible Builds have been broken for months but I have zero reason to doubt Signal s security in any way.

Lastly, it was observed that there was a concise and diagrammatic overview of supply chain threats on the SLSA website.

Two new academic papers Two new scholarly papers were published this month. Firstly, Mathieu Acher, Beno t Combemale, Georges Aaron Randrianaina and Jean-Marc J z quel of University of Rennes on Embracing Deep Variability For Reproducibility & Replicability. The authors describe their approach as follows:
In this short [vision] paper we delve into the application of software engineering techniques, specifically variability management, to systematically identify and explicit points of variability that may give rise to reproducibility issues (e.g., language, libraries, compiler, virtual machine, OS, environment variables, etc.). The primary objectives are: i) gaining insights into the variability layers and their possible interactions, ii) capturing and documenting configurations for the sake of reproducibility, and iii) exploring diverse configurations to replicate, and hence validate and ensure the robustness of results. By adopting these methodologies, we aim to address the complexities associated with reproducibility and replicability in modern software systems and environments, facilitating a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on these critical aspects.
(A PDF of this article is available.)
Secondly, Ludovic Court s, Timothy Sample, Simon Tournier and Stefano Zacchiroli have collaborated to publish a paper on Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment. Their paper was motivated because:
The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.
(A PDF of this article is also available.)

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 266, 267, 268 and 269 to Debian, making the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Use xz --list to supplement output when comparing .xz archives; essential when metadata differs. (#1069329)
    • Include xz --verbose --verbose (ie. double) output. (#1069329)
    • Strip the first line from the xz --list output. [ ]
    • Only include xz --list --verbose output if the xz has no other differences. [ ]
    • Actually append the xz --list after the container differences, as it simplifies a lot. [ ]
  • Testing improvements:
    • Allow Debian testing to fail right now. [ ]
    • Drop apktool from Build-Depends; we can still test APK functionality via autopkgtests. (#1071410)
    • Add a versioned dependency for at least version 5.4.5 for the xz tests as they fail under (at least) version 5.2.8. (#374)
    • Fix tests for 7zip 24.05. [ ][ ]
    • Fix all tests after additon of xz --list. [ ][ ]
  • Misc:
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
In addition, James Addison fixed an issue where the HTML output showed only the first difference in a file, while the text output shows all differences [ ][ ][ ], Sergei Trofimovich amended the 7zip version test for older 7z versions that include the string [64] [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian relaxed the versioned dependency to allow version 5.4.1 for the xz tests [ ] and proposed updates to guix for versions 267, 268 and pushed version 269 to Guix. Furthermore, Eli Schwartz updated the diffoscope.org website in order to explain how to install diffoscope on Gentoo [ ].

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb making the print CSS stylesheet nicer [ ]. Fay Stegerman made a number of updates to the page about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ][ ][ ] and Holger Levsen added some of their presentations to the Resources page. Furthermore, IOhannes zm lnig stipulated support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in clang version 16.0.0+ [ ], Jan Zerebecki expanded the Formal definition page and fixed a number of typos on the Buy-in page [ ] and Simon Josefsson fixed the link to Trisquel GNU/Linux on the Projects page [ ].

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a number of patches to fix specific reproducibility issues, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Enable the rebuilder-snapshot API on osuosl4. [ ]
    • Schedule the i386 architecture a bit more often. [ ]
    • Adapt cleanup_nodes.sh to the new way of running our build services. [ ]
    • Add 8 more workers for the i386 architecture. [ ]
    • Update configuration now that the infom07 and infom08 nodes have been reinstalled as real i386 systems. [ ]
    • Make diffoscope timeouts more visible on the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ]
    • Mark the cbxi4a-armhf node as down. [ ][ ]
    • Only install the hdmi2usb-mode-switch package only on Debian bookworm and earlier [ ] and only install the haskell-platform package on Debian bullseye [ ].
  • Misc:
    • Install the ntpdate utility as we need it later. [ ]
    • Document the progress on the i386 architecture nodes at Infomaniak. [ ]
    • Drop an outdated and unnoticed notice. [ ]
    • Add live_setup_schroot to the list of so-called zombie jobs. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo reinstalled the infom07 and infom08 nodes [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4a node as online [ ].
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:

7 June 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf Bursaries, /usr-move, sbuild, and more! (by 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.

DebConf Bursary updates, by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh is the bursaries team lead for DebConf 24. Bursary requests are dispatched to a team of volunteers to review. The results are collated, adjusted and merged to produce priority lists of requests to fund. Utkarsh raised the team, coordinated the review, and issued bursaries to attendees.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne More and more, the /usr-move transition is being carried out by multiple contributors and many performed around a hundred of the requested uploads. Of these, Helmut contributed five patches and two uploads. As a result, there are less than 350 packages left to be converted, and all of the non-trivial cases have patches. We started with three times that number. Thanks to everyone involved for supporting this effort. For people interested in background information of this transition, Helmut gave a presentation at MiniDebConf Berlin 2024 (slides).

sbuild, by Helmut Grohne While unshare mode of sbuild has existed for quite a while, it is now getting significant use in Debian, and new problems are popping up. Helmut looked into an apparmor-related failure and provided a diagnosis. While relevant code would detect the chroot nature of a schroot backend and skip apparmor tests, the unshare environment would be just good enough to run and fail the test. As sbuild exposes fewer special kernel filesystems, the tests will be skipped again. Another problem popped up when gobject-introspection added a dependency on the host architecture Python interpreter in a cross build environment. sbuild would prefer installing (and failing) a host architecture Python to installing the qemu alternative. Attempts to fix this would result in systemd killing sbuild. ischroot as used by libc6.postinst would not classify the unshare environment as a chroot. Therefore libc6.postinst would run telinit which would kill the build process. This is a complex interaction problem that shall eventually be solved by providing triggers from libc6 to be implemented by affected init systems.

Salsa CI updates, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Several issues arose about Salsa CI last month, and it is probably worth mentioning part of the challenges of defining its framework in YAML. With the upcoming end-of-support of Debian 10 buster as LTS, armel was removed from deb.debian.org, making the jobs that build images for buster/armel to fail. While the removal of buster/armel from the repositories is a natural change, it put some light on the flaws in the Salsa CI design regarding the support of the different Debian releases. Currently, the images are defined like these (from .images-debian.yml): 
.all-supported-releases: &all-supported-releases
  - stretch
  - stretch-backports
  - buster
  - bullseye
  - bullseye-backports
  - bookworm
  - bookworm-backports
  - trixie
  - sid
  - experimental
And from them, different images are built according to the different jobs and how they are supported, for example: 
images-prod-arm:
  stage: build
  extends: .build_template
  tags:
    - $SALSA_CI_ARM_RUNNER_TAG
  parallel:
    matrix:
      # Base image, all releases, all arches
      - IMAGE_NAME: base
        ARCH:
          - arm32v5
          - arm32v7
          - arm64v8
        RELEASE: *all-supported-releases
The removal of buster/armel could be easily reflected as: 
images-prod-arm:
  stage: build
  extends: .build_template
  tags:
    - $SALSA_CI_ARM_RUNNER_TAG
  parallel:
    matrix:
      # Base image, fully supported releases, all arches
      - IMAGE_NAME: base
        ARCH:
          - arm32v5
          - arm32v7
          - arm64v8
        RELEASE:
          - stretch
          - buster
          - bullseye
          - bullseye-backports
          - bookworm
          - bookworm-backports
          - trixie
          - sid
          - experimental
      # buster only supports armhf and arm64
      - IMAGE_NAME: base
        ARCH:
          - arm32v7
          - arm64v8
        RELEASE: buster
Evidently, this increases duplication of the release support data, which is of course not optimal and it is error prone when changing the data about supported releases. A better approach would be to have two different YAML lists, such as: 
# releases that have partial support. E.g.: buster is transitioning to
# Debian LTS, and buster armel is no longer found in deb.debian.org
.old-releases: &old-releases
  - stretch
  - buster

.currently-supported-releases: &currently-supported-releases
  - bullseye
  - bullseye-backports
  - bookworm
  - bookworm-backports
  - trixie
  - sid
  - experimental
and then a unified list: 
.all-supported-releases: &all-supported-releases
  - *old-releases
  - *currently-supported-releases
that could be used in the matrix of the jobs that build all the images available in the pipeline container registry. However, due to limitations in GitLab, it is not possible to expand the variables or mapping values in a parallel:matrix context. At least not in an elegant fashion. This is the kind of issue that recently arose and that Santiago is currently working to solve, in the simplest possible way. Astute readers would notice that stretch is listed in the fully supported releases. And there is no problem with stretch, because it is built from archive.debian.org. Otto actually has tried to fix the broken image build job doing the same, but it is still incorrect, because the security repository is not (yet) available in archive.debian.org. Additionally, Santiago has also worked on other merge requests, such as:
  1. support branch/tags as target head in the test projects,
  2. build autopkgtest image on top of stable
  3. Add .yamllint and make it happy in the autopkgtest-lxc project
  4. enable FF_SCRIPT_SECTIONS to log multiline commands, among others.

Archiving DebConf Websites, by Stefano Rivera DebConf, the annual Debian conference, has its own new website every year. These are typically complex dynamic web applications (featuring registration, call for papers, scheduling, etc.) Once the conference is over, there is no need to keep maintaining these applications, so we archive the sites off as static HTML, and serve them from Debian s static CDN. Stefano archived the websites for the last two DebConfs. The schedule system behind DebConf 14 and 15 s websites was a derivative of Canonical s summit system. This was only used for a couple of years before migrating to wafer, the current system. Archiving summit content has been on the nice to have list for years, but nobody has ever tackled it. The machine that served the sites went away a couple of years ago. After much digging, a backup of the database was found, and Stefano got this code running on an ancient Python 2.7. Recently Stefano put this all together and hooked in an archive export to finally get this content preserved.

Python 3.x and pypy3 security bug triage, by Stefano Rivera Stefano Rivera triaged all the open security bugs against the Python 3.x and PyPy3 packages for Debian s stable and LTS releases. Several had been fixed but this wasn t recorded in the security tracker.

Linux livepatching support for Debian, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago filed ITP bug #1070494. As stated in the bug, more than an Intent to Package, it is an Intent to Design and Implement live patching support for the Linux kernel in Debian. For now, Emmanuel and Santiago have done exploratory work and they are working to understand the different possibilities to implement livepatching. One possible direction is to rely on kpatch, and the other is to package the modules using regular packaging tools. Also, it is needed to evaluate if it is possible to rely on distributing the modules via packages, or instead as a service, as it is done by some commercial distributions.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups-bjnp to improve packaging.
  • Colin Watson tracked down a baffling CI issue in openssh to unblock several merge requests, removed the user_readenv=1 option from its PAM configuration, and started on the first stage of his plan to split out GSS-API key exchange support to separate packages.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 26 packages to new upstream versions, and cherry-picking an upstream PR to fix a pytest 8 incompatibility in ipywidgets.
  • Colin NMUed a couple of packages to reduce the need for explicit overrides in Packages-arch-specific, and removed some other obsolete entries from there.
  • Emilio managed various library transitions, and helped finish a few of the remaining t64 transitions.
  • Helmut sent a patch for enabling piuparts to work as a regular user building on earlier work.
  • Helmut sent patches for 7 cross build failures, 6 other debian bugs and fixed an infrastructure problem in crossqa.debian.net.
  • Nicholas worked on a sponsored package upload, and discovered the blhc tool for diagnosing build hardening.
  • Stefano Rivera started and completed the re2 transition. The release team suggested moving to a virtual package scheme that includes the absl ABI (as re2 now depends on it). Adopted this.
  • Stefano continued to work on DebConf 24 planning.
  • Santiago continued to work on DebConf24 Content tasks as well as Debconf25 organisation.

24 May 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Discover release 0.3.0 of the debusine software factory (by Colin Watson)

Debusine is a Free Software project developed by Freexian to manage scheduling and distribution of Debian-related tasks to a network of worker machines. It was started some time back, but its development pace has recently increased significantly thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund. You can read more about it in its documentation. For more background, Enrico Zini and Carles Pina i Estany gave a talk on Debusine in November 2023 at the mini-DebConf in Cambridge. We described the work from our first funded milestone in a post to debian-devel-announce in March. We ve recently finished work on our second funded milestone, culminating in releasing version 0.3.0 to unstable. Our focus on this milestone was on new building blocks to allow us to automatically orchestrate QA tasks in bulk. Full details are in our release history document. As usual, debusine.debian.net is up to date with our latest work.

Collections In the previous milestone, debusine could store artifacts and run tasks against those artifacts. However, on its own this required the user to do a lot of manual work, because the only way to refer to an artifact was by its ID. We now have the concept of a collection, which can store references to other artifacts (or indeed to other collections) with some attached metadata. These are structured by category, so for example a debian:suite collection contains references to source and binary package artifacts with their names, versions, and architectures as metadata. This allows us to look up artifacts using a simple query language instead of just by ID. At the moment, the main visible effect of this is that our Getting started with debusine tutorial no longer needs users of debusine.debian.net to create their own build environments before being able to submit other work requests: they can refer to existing environments using something like debian/match:codename=trixie:variant=sbuild instead. We also have a basic user interface allowing you to browse existing collections, accessible via the relevant workspace (such as the default System workspace).

Workflows We ve always known that individual tasks were just a starting point: real-world requirements often involve chaining many tasks together, as many Debian developers already do using the Salsa CI pipeline. debusine intends to approach a similar problem from a different angle, defining common workflows that can be applied at the scale of a whole distribution without being tightly coupled to where each package s code is hosted. In time we intend to define a way for users to specify their own workflows, but rather than getting too bogged down in this we started by building a couple of predefined workflows into debusine. The update_environments workflow is used to create multiple build environments in bulk, while the sbuild workflow builds a source package for all the architectures that it supports and for which debusine has workers. (debusine.debian.net currently has amd64 and arm64 workers, supporting the amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, and i386 architectures between them.) Upcoming work will build on this by adding more workflows that chain tasks together in various ways, such as workflows that build a package and run QA tasks on the results, or a workflow that builds a package and uploads the result to an upload queue.

Next steps Our next planned milestone involves expanding debusine s capability as a build daemon. For that, we already know that there are a number of specific extra workflow steps we need to add, and we ve reached out to some members of Debian s buildd team to ask for feedback on what they consider necessary. We hope to be able to replace some of Freexian s own build infrastructure with debusine in the near future.

11 April 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2024

Welcome to the March 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible
  2. Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor
  3. Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible
  4. Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management
  5. Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds
  6. Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism
  7. Distribution work
  8. Mailing list highlights
  9. Website updates
  10. Delta chat clients now reproducible
  11. diffoscope updates
  12. Upstream patches
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible In remarkable news, Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd reported that that the Arch Linux minimal container userland is now 100% reproducible after work by developers dvzv and Foxboron on the one remaining package. This represents a real world , widely-used Linux distribution being reproducible. Their post, which kpcyrd suffixed with the question now what? , continues on to outline some potential next steps, including validating whether the container image itself could be reproduced bit-for-bit. The post, which was itself a followup for an Arch Linux update earlier in the month, generated a significant number of replies.

Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor From our mailing list this month, Vagrant Cascadian wrote about being asked about trying to perform concrete reproducibility checks for recent Debian security updates, in an attempt to gain some confidence about Debian s build infrastructure given that they performed builds in environments running the high-profile XZ vulnerability. Vagrant reports (with some caveats):
So far, I have not found any reproducibility issues; everything I tested I was able to get to build bit-for-bit identical with what is in the Debian archive.
That is to say, reproducibility testing permitted Vagrant and Debian to claim with some confidence that builds performed when this vulnerable version of XZ was installed were not interfered with.

Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible In March, Davide Cavalca gave a talk at the 2024 Southern California Linux Expo (aka SCALE 21x) about the ongoing effort to make the Fedora Linux distribution reproducible. Documented in more detail on Fedora s website, the talk touched on topics such as the specifics of implementing reproducible builds in Fedora, the challenges encountered, the current status and what s coming next. (YouTube video)

Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management Julien Malka published a brief but interesting paper in the HAL open archive on Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management:
Functional package managers (FPMs) and reproducible builds (R-B) are technologies and methodologies that are conceptually very different from the traditional software deployment model, and that have promising properties for software supply chain security. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of FPMs and R-B on the security of the software supply chain and propose improvements to the FPM model to further improve trust in the open source supply chain. PDF
Julien s paper poses a number of research questions on how the model of distributions such as GNU Guix and NixOS can be leveraged to further improve the safety of the software supply chain , etc.

Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds In a long line of commendably detailed blog posts, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier have together published two interesting posts on the GNU Guix blog this month. In early March, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier wrote about software and source code identification and how that might be performed using Guix, rhetorically posing the questions: What does it take to identify software ? How can we tell what software is running on a machine to determine, for example, what security vulnerabilities might affect it? Later in the month, Ludovic Court s wrote a solo post describing adventures on the quest for long-term reproducible deployment. Ludovic s post touches on GNU Guix s aim to support time travel , the ability to reliably (and reproducibly) revert to an earlier point in time, employing the iconic image of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock in Safety Last! (1925) to poetically illustrate both the slapstick nature of current modern technology and the gymnastics required to navigate hazards of our own making.

Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced add-determinism, a work-in-progress reimplementation of the Reproducible Builds project s own strip-nondeterminism tool in the Rust programming language, intended to be used as a post-processor in RPM-based distributions such as Fedora In addition, Yossi Kreinin published a blog post titled refix: fast, debuggable, reproducible builds that describes a tool that post-processes binaries in such a way that they are still debuggable with gdb, etc.. Yossi post details the motivation and techniques behind the (fast) performance of the tool.

Distribution work In Debian this month, since the testing framework no longer varies the build path, James Addison performed a bulk downgrade of the bug severity for issues filed with a level of normal to a new level of wishlist. In addition, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 23 were removed this month adding to ever-growing knowledge about identified issues. As part of this effort, a number of issue types were updated, including Chris Lamb adding a new ocaml_include_directories toolchain issue [ ] and James Addison adding a new filesystem_order_in_java_jar_manifest_mf_include_resource issue [ ] and updating the random_uuid_in_notebooks_generated_by_nbsphinx to reference a relevant discussion thread [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 24th status update of reproducible Debian ISO images. Roland highlights that the images for Debian unstable often cannot be generated due to changes in that distribution related to the 64-bit time_t transition. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his reproducibility work in openSUSE.

Mailing list highlights Elsewhere on our mailing list this month:

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:
  • Pol Dellaiera noticed the frequent need to correctly cite the website itself in academic work. To facilitate easier citation across multiple formats, Pol contributed a Citation File Format (CIF) file. As a result, an export in BibTeX format is now available in the Academic Publications section. Pol encourages community contributions to further refine the CITATION.cff file. Pol also added an substantial new section to the buy in page documenting the role of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and ephemeral development environments. [ ][ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a new commandments page to the documentation [ ][ ] and fixed some incorrect YAML elsewhere on the site [ ].
  • Chris Lamb add three recent academic papers to the publications page of the website. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo and Holger Levsen collaborated to add Infomaniak as a sponsor of amd64 virtual machines. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus updated the stable outputs page, dropping version numbers from Python documentation pages [ ] and noting that Python s set data structure is also affected by the PYTHONHASHSEED functionality. [ ]

Delta chat clients now reproducible Delta Chat, an open source messaging application that can work over email, announced this month that the Rust-based core library underlying Delta chat application is now reproducible.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 259, 260 and 261 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for the zipdetails tool from the Perl distribution. Thanks to Fay Stegerman and Larry Doolittle et al. for the pointer and thread about this tool. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t identify Redis database dumps as GNU R database files based simply on their filename. [ ]
    • Add a missing call to File.recognizes so we actually perform the filename check for GNU R data files. [ ]
    • Don t crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file. (#1066991)
    • Correctly check for 7z being available and not lz4 when testing 7z. [ ]
    • Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an empty one. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Fix .epub tests after supporting the new zipdetails tool. [ ]
    • Don t use parenthesis within test skipping messages, as PyTest adds its own parenthesis. [ ]
    • Factor out Python version checking in test_zip.py. [ ]
    • Skip some Zip-related tests under Python 3.10.14, as a potential regression may have been backported to the 3.10.x series. [ ]
    • Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4 functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359). [ ]
In addition, Fay Stegerman updated diffoscope s monkey patch for supporting the unusual Mozilla ZIP file format after Python s zipfile module changed to detect potentially insecure overlapping entries within .zip files. (#362) Chris Lamb also updated the trydiffoscope command line client, dropping a build-dependency on the deprecated python3-distutils package to fix Debian bug #1065988 [ ], taking a moment to also refresh the packaging to the latest Debian standards [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian submitted an update for diffoscope version 260 in GNU Guix. [ ]

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a large number of patches, including: Bernhard M. Wiedemann used reproducibility-tooling to detect and fix packages that added changes in their %check section, thus failing when built with the --no-checks option. Only half of all openSUSE packages were tested so far, but a large number of bugs were filed, including ones against caddy, exiv2, gnome-disk-utility, grisbi, gsl, itinerary, kosmindoormap, libQuotient, med-tools, plasma6-disks, pspp, python-pypuppetdb, python-urlextract, rsync, vagrant-libvirt and xsimd. Similarly, Jean-Pierre De Jesus DIAZ employed reproducible builds techniques in order to test a proposed refactor of the ath9k-htc-firmware package. As the change produced bit-for-bit identical binaries to the previously shipped pre-built binaries:
I don t have the hardware to test this firmware, but the build produces the same hashes for the firmware so it s safe to say that the firmware should keep working.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In March, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Sleep less after a so-called 404 package state has occurred. [ ]
    • Schedule package builds more often. [ ][ ]
    • Regenerate all our HTML indexes every hour, but only every 12h for the released suites. [ ]
    • Create and update unstable and experimental base systems on armhf again. [ ][ ]
    • Don t reschedule so many depwait packages due to the current size of the i386 architecture queue. [ ]
    • Redefine our scheduling thresholds and amounts. [ ]
    • Schedule untested packages with a higher priority, otherwise slow architectures cannot keep up with the experimental distribution growing. [ ]
    • Only create the stats_buildinfo.png graph once per day. [ ][ ]
    • Reproducible Debian dashboard: refactoring, update several more static stats only every 12h. [ ]
    • Document how to use systemctl with new systemd-based services. [ ]
    • Temporarily disable armhf and i386 continuous integration tests in order to get some stability back. [ ]
    • Use the deb.debian.org CDN everywhere. [ ]
    • Remove the rsyslog logging facility on bookworm systems. [ ]
    • Add zst to the list of packages which are false-positive diskspace issues. [ ]
    • Detect failures to bootstrap Debian base systems. [ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable builds because the pacman package manager is broken. [ ][ ]
    • Split reproducible_html_live_status and split the scheduling timing . [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve handling when database is locked. [ ][ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Show failed services that require manual cleanup. [ ][ ]
    • Integrate two new Infomaniak nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve IRC notifications for artifacts. [ ]
    • Run diffoscope in different systemd slices. [ ]
    • Run the node health check more often, as it can now repair some issues. [ ][ ]
    • Also include the string Bot in the userAgent for Git. (Re: #929013). [ ]
    • Document increased tmpfs size on our OUSL nodes. [ ]
    • Disable memory account for the reproducible_build service. [ ][ ]
    • Allow 10 times as many open files for the Jenkins service. [ ]
    • Set OOMPolicy=continue and OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 for both the Jenkins and the reproducible_build service. [ ]
Mattia Rizzolo also made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Define a systemd slice to group all relevant services. [ ][ ]
    • Add a bunch of quotes in scripts to assuage the shellcheck tool. [ ]
    • Add stats on how many packages have been built today so far. [ ]
    • Instruct systemd-run to handle diffoscope s exit codes specially. [ ]
    • Prefer the pgrep tool over grepping the output of ps. [ ]
    • Re-enable a couple of i386 and armhf architecture builders. [ ][ ]
    • Fix some stylistic issues flagged by the Python flake8 tool. [ ]
    • Cease scheduling Debian unstable and experimental on the armhf architecture due to the time_t transition. [ ]
    • Start a few more i386 & armhf workers. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarly skip pbuilder updates in the unstable distribution, but only on the armhf architecture. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Perform some large-scale refactoring on how the systemd service operates. [ ][ ]
    • Move the list of workers into a separate file so it s accessible to a number of scripts. [ ]
    • Refactor the powercycle_x86_nodes.py script to use the new IONOS API and its new Python bindings. [ ]
    • Also fix nph-logwatch after the worker changes. [ ]
    • Do not install the stunnel tool anymore, it shouldn t be needed by anything anymore. [ ]
    • Move temporary directories related to Arch Linux into a single directory for clarity. [ ]
    • Update the arm64 architecture host keys. [ ]
    • Use a common Postfix configuration. [ ]
The following changes were also made by:
  • Jan-Benedict Glaw:
    • Initial work to clean up a messy NetBSD-related script. [ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Show the installer log if the installer fails to build. [ ]
    • Avoid the minus character (i.e. -) in a variable in order to allow for tags in openQA. [ ]
    • Update the schedule of Debian live image builds. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Maintenance on the virt* nodes is completed so bring them back online. [ ]
    • Use the fully qualified domain name in configuration. [ ]
Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

23 March 2024

Kentaro Hayashi: How about allocating more buildd resource for armel and armhf?

This article is cross-posting from grow-your-ideas. This is just an idea. salsa.debian.org

The problem According to Developer Machines [1], current buildd machines are like this:
  • armel: 4 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel)
  • armhf: 7 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel and 3 for armhf only)
[1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi In contrast to other buildd architectures, these instances are quite a few and it seems that it causes a shortage of buildd resourses. (e.g. during mass transition, give-back turn around time becomes longer and longer.)

Actual situation As you know, during 64bit time_t transition, many packages should be built, but it seems that +b1 or +bN build becomes slower. (I've hit BD-Uninstalled some times because of missing dependency rebuild) ref. https://qa.debian.org/dose/debcheck/unstable_main/index.html

Expected situation Allocate more buildd resources for armel and armhf. It is just an idea, but how about assigning some buildd as armel/armhf buildd? Above buildd is used only for arm64 buildd currently. Maybe there is some technical reason not suitable for armel/armhf buildd, but I don't know yet.
2024/03/24 UPDATE: arm-arm01,arm-arm03,arm-arm-04 has already assigned to armel/armhf buildd, so it is an invalid proposal. See https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=sid&buildd=buildd_arm64-arm-arm-01, https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=sid&buildd=buildd_arm64-arm-arm-03, https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=sid&buildd=buildd_arm64-arm-arm-04

Additional information
  • arm64: 10 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel, 6 for arm64 only)
  • amd64: 7 buildd (5 for amd64/i386 buildd)
  • riscv64: 9 buildd

9 March 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2024

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]
  • Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). [ ]
  • Don t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]
  • Fix compatibility with pytest 8.0. [ ]
  • Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]
  • Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]
  • Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]
  • Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]
  • Make test_zip black clean. [ ]
In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:
  • Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]
  • Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. [ ][ ]
  • Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]
    • Use the 64-bit amd64 kernel on all i386 nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]
    • Add an Erlang package set. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]
    • Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]
    • Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]
    • Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. [ ]
    • Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]
    • Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]
Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:
  • Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]
In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

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:
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:

7 February 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2024

Welcome to the January 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

How we executed a critical supply chain attack on PyTorch John Stawinski and Adnan Khan published a lengthy blog post detailing how they executed a supply-chain attack against PyTorch, a popular machine learning platform used by titans like Google, Meta, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin :
Our exploit path resulted in the ability to upload malicious PyTorch releases to GitHub, upload releases to [Amazon Web Services], potentially add code to the main repository branch, backdoor PyTorch dependencies the list goes on. In short, it was bad. Quite bad.
The attack pivoted on PyTorch s use of self-hosted runners as well as submitting a pull request to address a trivial typo in the project s README file to gain access to repository secrets and API keys that could subsequently be used for malicious purposes.

New Arch Linux forensic filesystem tool On our mailing list this month, long-time Reproducible Builds developer kpcyrd announced a new tool designed to forensically analyse Arch Linux filesystem images. Called archlinux-userland-fs-cmp, the tool is supposed to be used from a rescue image (any Linux) with an Arch install mounted to, [for example], /mnt. Crucially, however, at no point is any file from the mounted filesystem eval d or otherwise executed. Parsers are written in a memory safe language. More information about the tool can be found on their announcement message, as well as on the tool s homepage. A GIF of the tool in action is also available.

Issues with our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH code? Chris Lamb started a thread on our mailing list summarising some potential problems with the source code snippet the Reproducible Builds project has been using to parse the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable:
I m not 100% sure who originally wrote this code, but it was probably sometime in the ~2015 era, and it must be in a huge number of codebases by now. Anyway, Alejandro Colomar was working on the shadow security tool and pinged me regarding some potential issues with the code. You can see this conversation here.
Chris ends his message with a request that those with intimate or low-level knowledge of time_t, C types, overflows and the various parsing libraries in the C standard library (etc.) contribute with further info.

Distribution updates In Debian this month, Roland Clobus posted another detailed update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) . Additionally 7 of the 8 bookworm images from the official download link build reproducibly at any later time. In addition to this, three reviews of Debian packages were added, 17 were updated and 15 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Elsewhere, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann fixing a number of typos of the term nondeterministic . [ ] and Jan Zerebecki adding a substantial and highly welcome section to our page about SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to document its interaction with distribution rebuilds. [ ].
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 254 and 255 to Debian but focusing on triaging and/or merging code from other contributors. This included adding support for comparing eXtensible ARchive (.XAR/.PKG) files courtesy of Seth Michael Larson [ ][ ], as well considerable work from Vekhir in order to fix compatibility between various and subtle incompatible versions of the progressbar libraries in Python [ ][ ][ ][ ]. Thanks!

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In January, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16. [ ]
    • Use diffoscope from the Debian release being tested again. [ ]
    • Improve the handling when killing unwanted processes [ ][ ][ ] and be more verbose about it, too [ ].
    • Don t mark a job as failed if process marked as to-be-killed is already gone. [ ]
    • Display the architecture of builds that have been running for more than 48 hours. [ ]
    • Reboot arm64 nodes when they hit an OOM (out of memory) state. [ ]
  • Package rescheduling changes:
    • Reduce IRC notifications to 1 when rescheduling due to package status changes. [ ]
    • Correctly set SUDO_USER when rescheduling packages. [ ]
    • Automatically reschedule packages regressing to FTBFS (build failure) or FTBR (build success, but unreproducible). [ ]
  • OpenWrt-related changes:
    • Install the python3-dev and python3-pyelftools packages as they are now needed for the sunxi target. [ ][ ]
    • Also install the libpam0g-dev which is needed by some OpenWrt hardware targets. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • As it s January, set the real_year variable to 2024 [ ] and bump various copyright years as well [ ].
    • Fix a large (!) number of spelling mistakes in various scripts. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Prevent Squid and Systemd processes from being killed by the kernel s OOM killer. [ ]
    • Install the iptables tool everywhere, else our custom rc.local script fails. [ ]
    • Cleanup the /srv/workspace/pbuilder directory on boot. [ ]
    • Automatically restart Squid if it fails. [ ]
    • Limit the execution of chroot-installation jobs to a maximum of 4 concurrent runs. [ ][ ]
Significant amounts of node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen (eg. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] etc.) and Vagrant Cascadian (eg. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]). Indeed, Vagrant Cascadian handled an extended power outage for the network running the Debian armhf architecture test infrastructure. This provided the incentive to replace the UPS batteries and consolidate infrastructure to reduce future UPS load. [ ] Elsewhere in our infrastructure, however, Holger Levsen also adjusted the email configuration for @reproducible-builds.org to deal with a new SMTP email attack. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project tries to detects, dissects and 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: Separate to this, Vagrant Cascadian followed up with the relevant maintainers when reproducibility fixes were not included in newly-uploaded versions of the mm-common package in Debian this was quickly fixed, however. [ ]
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:

3 January 2024

John Goerzen: Live Migrating from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm

I ve been getting annoyed with Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) for years now. It s a fork of Debian, but manages to omit some of the most useful things. So I ve decided to migrate all of my Pis to run pure Debian. These are my reasons:
  1. Raspberry Pi OS has, for years now, specified that there is no upgrade path. That is, to get to a newer major release, it s a reinstall. While I have sometimes worked around this, for a device that is frequently installed in hard-to-reach locations, this is even more important than usual. It s common for me to upgrade machines for a decade or more across Debian releases and there s no reason that it should be so much more difficult with Raspbian.
  2. As I noted in Consider Security First, the security situation for Raspberry Pi OS isn t as good as it is with Debian.
  3. Raspbian lags behind Debian often times by 6 months or more for major releases, and days or weeks for bug fixes and security patches.
  4. Raspbian has no direct backports support, though Raspberry Pi 3 and above can use Debian s backports (per my instructions as Installing Debian Backports on Raspberry Pi)
  5. Raspbian uses a custom kernel without initramfs support
It turns out it is actually possible to do an in-place migration from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm. Here I will describe how. Even if you don t have a Raspberry Pi, this might still be instructive on how Raspbian and Debian packages work.

WARNINGS Before continuing, back up your system. This process isn t for the neophyte and it is entirely possible to mess up your boot device to the point that you have to do a fresh install to get your Pi to boot. This isn t a supported process at all.

Architecture Confusion Debian has three ARM-based architectures:
  • armel, for the lowest-end 32-bit ARM devices without hardware floating point support
  • armhf, for the higher-end 32-bit ARM devices with hardware float (hence hf )
  • arm64, for 64-bit ARM devices (which all have hardware float)
Although the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 do support hardware float, they lack support for other CPU features that Debian s armhf architecture assumes. Therefore, the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 could only run Debian s armel architecture. Raspberry Pi 3 and above are capable of running 64-bit, and can run both armhf and arm64. Prior to the release of the Raspberry Pi 5 / Raspbian bookworm, Raspbian only shipped the armhf architecture. Well, it was an architecture they called armhf, but it was different from Debian s armhf in that everything was recompiled to work with the more limited set of features on the earlier Raspberry Pi boards. It was really somewhere between Debian s armel and armhf archs. You could run Debian armel on those, but it would run more slowly, due to doing floating point calculations without hardware support. Debian s raspi FAQ goes into this a bit. What I am going to describe here is going from Raspbian armhf to Debian armhf with a 64-bit kernel. Therefore, it will only work with Raspberry Pi 3 and above. It may theoretically be possible to take a Raspberry Pi 2 to Debian armhf with a 32-bit kernel, but I haven t tried this and it may be more difficult. I have seen conflicting information on whether armhf really works on a Pi 2. (If you do try it on a Pi 2, ignore everything about arm64 and 64-bit kernels below, and just go with the linux-image-armmp-lpae kernel per the ARMMP page) There is another wrinkle: Debian doesn t support running 32-bit ARM kernels on 64-bit ARM CPUs, though it does support running a 32-bit userland on them. So we will wind up with a system with kernel packages from arm64 and everything else from armhf. This is a perfectly valid configuration as the arm64 like x86_64 is multiarch (that is, the CPU can natively execute both the 32-bit and 64-bit instructions). (It is theoretically possible to crossgrade a system from 32-bit to 64-bit userland, but that felt like a rather heavy lift for dubious benefit on a Pi; nevertheless, if you want to make this process even more complicated, refer to the CrossGrading page.)

Prerequisites and Limitations In addition to the need for a Raspberry Pi 3 or above in order for this to work, there are a few other things to mention. If you are using the GPIO features of the Pi, I don t know if those work with Debian. I think Raspberry Pi OS modified the desktop environment more than other components. All of my Pis are headless, so I don t know if this process will work if you use a desktop environment. I am assuming you are booting from a MicroSD card as is typical in the Raspberry Pi world. The Pi s firmware looks for a FAT partition (MBR type 0x0c) and looks within it for boot information. Depending on how long ago you first installed an OS on your Pi, your /boot may be too small for Debian. Use df -h /boot to see how big it is. I recommend 200MB at minimum. If your /boot is smaller than that, stop now (or use some other system to shrink your root filesystem and rearrange your partitions; I ve done this, but it s outside the scope of this article.) You need to have stable power. Once you begin this process, your pi will mostly be left in a non-bootable state until you finish. (You did make a backup, right?)

Basic idea The basic idea here is that since bookworm has almost entirely newer packages then bullseye, we can just switch over to it and let the Debian packages replace the Raspbian ones as they are upgraded. Well, it s not quite that easy, but that s the main idea.

Preparation First, make a backup. Even an image of your MicroSD card might be nice. OK, I think I ve said that enough now. It would be a good idea to have a HDMI cable (with the appropriate size of connector for your particular Pi board) and a HDMI display handy so you can troubleshoot any bootup issues with a console.

Preparation: access The Raspberry Pi OS by default sets up a user named pi that can use sudo to gain root without a password. I think this is an insecure practice, but assuming you haven t changed it, you will need to ensure it still works once you move to Debian. Raspberry Pi OS had a patch in their sudo package to enable it, and that will be removed when Debian s sudo package is installed. So, put this in /etc/sudoers.d/010_picompat: 
pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Also, there may be no password set for the root account. It would be a good idea to set one; it makes it easier to log in at the console. Use the passwd command as root to do so.

Preparation: bluetooth Debian doesn t correctly identify the Bluetooth hardware address. You can save it off to a file by running hcitool dev > /root/bluetooth-from-raspbian.txt. I don t use Bluetooth, but this should let you develop a script to bring it up properly.

Preparation: Debian archive keyring You will next need to install Debian s archive keyring so that apt can authenticate packages from Debian. Go to the bookworm download page for debian-archive-keyring and copy the URL for one of the files, then download it on the pi. For instance: 
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-archive-keyring/debian-archive-keyring_2023.3+deb12u1_all.deb
Use sha256sum to verify the checksum of the downloaded file, comparing it to the package page on the Debian site. Now, you ll install it with: 
dpkg -i debian-archive-keyring_2023.3+deb12u1_all.deb

Package first steps From here on, we are making modifications to the system that can leave it in a non-bootable state. Examine /etc/apt/sources.list and all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d. Most likely you will want to delete or comment out all lines in all files there. Replace them with something like: 
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
(you might leave off contrib and non-free depending on your needs) Now, we re going to tell it that we ll support arm64 packages: 
dpkg --add-architecture arm64
And finally, download the bookworm package lists: 
apt-get update
If there are any errors from that command, fix them and don t proceed until you have a clean run of apt-get update.

Moving /boot to /boot/firmware The boot FAT partition I mentioned above is mounted at /boot by Raspberry Pi OS, but Debian s scripts assume it will be at /boot/firmware. We need to fix this. First: 
umount /boot
mkdir /boot/firmware
Now, edit fstab and change the reference to /boot to be to /boot/firmware. Now: 
mount -v /boot/firmware
cd /boot/firmware
mv -vi * ..
This mounts the filesystem at the new location, and moves all its contents back to where apt believes it should be. Debian s packages will populate /boot/firmware later.

Installing the first packages Now we start by installing the first of the needed packages. Eventually we will wind up with roughly the same set Debian uses. 
apt-get install linux-image-arm64
apt-get install firmware-brcm80211=20230210-5
apt-get install raspi-firmware
If you get errors relating to firmware-brcm80211 from any commands, run that install firmware-brcm80211 command and then proceed. There are a few packages that Raspbian marked as newer than the version in bookworm (whether or not they really are), and that s one of them.

Configuring the bootloader We need to configure a few things in /etc/default/raspi-firmware before proceeding. Edit that file. First, uncomment (or add) a line like this: 
KERNEL_ARCH="arm64"
Next, in /boot/cmdline.txt you can find your old Raspbian boot command line. It will say something like: 
root=PARTUUID=...
Save off the bit starting with PARTUUID. Back in /etc/default/raspi-firmware, set a line like this: 
ROOTPART=PARTUUID=abcdef00
(substituting your real value for abcdef00). This is necessary because the microSD card device name often changes from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/mmcblk1 when switching to Debian s kernel. raspi-firmware will encode the current device name in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt by default, which will be wrong once you boot into Debian s kernel. The PARTUUID approach lets it work regardless of the device name.

Purging the Raspbian kernel Run: 
dpkg --purge raspberrypi-kernel

Upgrading the system At this point, we are going to run the procedure beginning at section 4.4.3 of the Debian release notes. Generally, you will do: 
apt-get -u upgrade
apt full-upgrade
Fix any errors at each step before proceeding to the next. Now, to remove some cruft, run: 
apt-get --purge autoremove
Inspect the list to make sure nothing important isn t going to be removed.

Removing Raspbian cruft You can list some of the cruft with: 
apt list '~o'
And remove it with: 
apt purge '~o'
I also don t run Bluetooth, and it seemed to sometimes hang on boot becuase I didn t bother to fix it, so I did: 
apt-get --purge remove bluez

Installing some packages This makes sure some basic Debian infrastructure is available: 
apt-get install wpasupplicant parted dosfstools wireless-tools iw alsa-tools
apt-get --purge autoremove

Installing firmware Now run: 
apt-get install firmware-linux

Resolving firmware package version issues If it gives an error about the installed version of a package, you may need to force it to the bookworm version. For me, this often happened with firmware-atheros, firmware-libertas, and firmware-realtek. Here s how to resolve it, with firmware-realtek as an example:
  1. Go to https://packages.debian.org/PACKAGENAME for instance, https://packages.debian.org/firmware-realtek. Note the version number in bookworm in this case, 20230210-5.
  2. Now, you will force the installation of that package at that version: 
    apt-get install firmware-realtek=20230210-5
  3. Repeat with every conflicting package until done.
  4. Rerun apt-get install firmware-linux and make sure it runs cleanly.
Also, in the end you should be able to: 
apt-get install firmware-atheros firmware-libertas firmware-realtek firmware-linux

Dealing with other Raspbian packages The Debian release notes discuss removing non-Debian packages. There will still be a few of those. Run: 
apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'
Deal with them; mostly you will need to force the installation of a bookworm version using the procedure in the section Resolving firmware package version issues above (even if it s not for a firmware package). For non-firmware packages, you might possibly want to add --mark-auto to your apt-get install command line to allow the package to be autoremoved later if the things depending on it go away. If you aren t going to use Bluetooth, I recommend apt-get --purge remove bluez as well. Sometimes it can hang at boot if you don t fix it up as described above.

Set up networking We ll be switching to the Debian method of networking, so we ll create some files in /etc/network/interfaces.d. First, eth0 should look like this: 
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet6 auto
And wlan0 should look like this: 
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Raspbian is inconsistent about using eth0/wlan0 or renamed interface. Run ifconfig or ip addr. If you see a long-named interface such as enx<something> or wlp<something>, copy the eth0 file to the one named after the enx interface, or the wlan0 file to the one named after the wlp interface, and edit the internal references to eth0/wlan0 in this new file to name the long interface name. If using wifi, verify that your SSIDs and passwords are in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. It should have lines like: 
network= 
   ssid="NetworkName"
   psk="passwordHere"
(This is where Raspberry Pi OS put them).

Deal with DHCP Raspberry Pi OS used dhcpcd, whereas bookworm normally uses isc-dhcp-client. Verify the system is in the correct state: 
apt-get install isc-dhcp-client
apt-get --purge remove dhcpcd dhcpcd-base dhcpcd5 dhcpcd-dbus

Set up LEDs To set up the LEDs to trigger on MicroSD activity as they did with Raspbian, follow the Debian instructions. Run apt-get install sysfsutils. Then put this in a file at /etc/sysfs.d/local-raspi-leds.conf: 
class/leds/ACT/brightness = 1
class/leds/ACT/trigger = mmc1

Prepare for boot To make sure all the /boot/firmware files are updated, run update-initramfs -u. Verify that root in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt references the PARTUUID as appropriate. Verify that /boot/firmware/config.txt contains the lines arm_64bit=1 and upstream_kernel=1. If not, go back to the section on modifying /etc/default/raspi-firmware and fix it up.

The moment arrives Cross your fingers and try rebooting into your Debian system: 
reboot
For some reason, I found that the first boot into Debian seems to hang for 30-60 seconds during bootstrap. I m not sure why; don t panic if that happens. It may be necessary to power cycle the Pi for this boot.

Troubleshooting If things don t work out, hook up the Pi to a HDMI display and see what s up. If I anticipated a particular problem, I would have documented it here (a lot of the things I documented here are because I ran into them!) So I can t give specific advice other than to watch boot messages on the console. If you don t even get kernel messages going, then there is some problem with your partition table or /boot/firmware FAT partition. Otherwise, you ve at least got the kernel going and can troubleshoot like usual from there.

6 December 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2023

Welcome to the November 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid 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 (more).

Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Amazingly, the agenda and all notes from all sessions are all online many thanks to everyone who wrote notes from the sessions. As a followup on one idea, started at the summit, Alexander Couzens and Holger Levsen started work on a cache (or tailored front-end) for the snapshot.debian.org service. The general idea is that, when rebuilding Debian, you do not actually need the whole ~140TB of data from snapshot.debian.org; rather, only a very small subset of the packages are ever used for for building. It turns out, for amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64 and s390 for Debian trixie, unstable and experimental, this is only around 500GB ie. less than 1%. Although the new service not yet ready for usage, it has already provided a promising outlook in this regard. More information is available on https://rebuilder-snapshot.debian.net and we hope that this service becomes usable in the coming weeks. The adjacent picture shows a sticky note authored by Jan-Benedict Glaw at the summit in Hamburg, confirming Holger Levsen s theory that rebuilding all Debian packages needs a very small subset of packages, the text states that 69,200 packages (in Debian sid) list 24,850 packages in their .buildinfo files, in 8,0200 variations. This little piece of paper was the beginning of rebuilder-snapshot and is a direct outcome of the summit! The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Beyond Trusting FOSS presentation at SeaGL On November 4th, Vagrant Cascadian presented Beyond Trusting FOSS at SeaGL in Seattle, WA in the United States. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. The summary of Vagrant s talk mentions that it will:
[ ] introduce the concepts of Reproducible Builds, including best practices for developing and releasing software, the tools available to help diagnose issues, and touch on progress towards solving decades-old deeply pervasive fundamental security issues Learn how to verify and demonstrate trust, rather than simply hoping everything is OK!
Germane to the contents of the talk, the slides for Vagrant s talk can be built reproducibly, resulting in a PDF with a SHA1 of cfde2f8a0b7e6ec9b85377eeac0661d728b70f34 when built on Debian bookworm and c21fab273232c550ce822c4b0d9988e6c49aa2c3 on Debian sid at the time of writing.

Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar have published an article in a Special Issue of the IEEE s Security & Privacy magazine. Entitled A Viewpoint on Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security: A Research Agenda, the paper justifies the need for reproducible builds to reach developers and end-users specifically, and furthermore points out some under-researched topics that we have seen mentioned in interviews. An author pre-print of the article is available in PDF form.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:

openSUSE updates Bernhard M. Wiedemann has created a wiki page outlining an proposal to create a general-purpose Linux distribution which consists of 100% bit-reproducible packages albeit minus the embedded signature within RPM files. It would be based on openSUSE Tumbleweed or, if available, its Slowroll-variant. In addition, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Ubuntu Launchpad now supports .buildinfo files Back in 2017, Steve Langasek filed a bug against Ubuntu s Launchpad code hosting platform to report that .changes files (artifacts of building Ubuntu and Debian packages) reference .buildinfo files that aren t actually exposed by Launchpad itself. This was causing issues when attempting to process .changes files with tools such as Lintian. However, it was noticed last month that, in early August of this year, Simon Quigley had resolved this issue, and .buildinfo files are now available from the Launchpad system.

PHP reproducibility updates There have been two updates from the PHP programming language this month. Firstly, the widely-deployed PHPUnit framework for the PHP programming language have recently released version 10.5.0, which introduces the inclusion of a composer.lock file, ensuring total reproducibility of the shipped binary file. Further details and the discussion that went into their particular implementation can be found on the associated GitHub pull request. In addition, the presentation Leveraging Nix in the PHP ecosystem has been given in late October at the PHP International Conference in Munich by Pol Dellaiera. While the video replay is not yet available, the (reproducible) presentation slides and speaker notes are available.

diffoscope changes diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including:
  • Improving DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z. [ ]
  • Adding a missing RequiredToolNotFound import. [ ]
  • As a UI/UX improvement, try and avoid printing an extended traceback if diffoscope runs out of memory. [ ]
  • Mark diffoscope as stable on PyPI.org. [ ]
  • Uploading version 252 to Debian unstable. [ ]

Website updates A huge number of notes were added to our website that were taken at our recent Reproducible Builds Summit held between October 31st and November 2nd in Hamburg, Germany. In particular, a big thanks to Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Daan De Meyer, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Holger Levsen and Orhun Parmaks z. In addition to this, a number of other changes were made, including:

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:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Track packages marked as Priority: important in a new package set. [ ][ ]
    • Stop scheduling packages that fail to build from source in bookworm [ ] and bullseye. [ ].
    • Add old releases dashboard link in web navigation. [ ]
    • Permit re-run of the pool_buildinfos script to be re-run for a specific year. [ ]
    • Grant jbglaw access to the osuosl4 node [ ][ ] along with lynxis [ ].
    • Increase RAM on the amd64 Ionos builders from 48 GiB to 64 GiB; thanks IONOS! [ ]
    • Move buster to archived suites. [ ][ ]
    • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16 in order to improve stability [ ], reduce the workers for amd64 from 32 to 28 and, for i386, reduce from 12 down to 8 [ ].
    • Show the entire build history of each Debian package. [ ]
    • Stop scheduling already tested package/version combinations in Debian bookworm. [ ]
  • Snapshot service for rebuilders
    • Add an HTTP-based API endpoint. [ ][ ]
    • Add a Gunicorn instance to serve the HTTP API. [ ]
    • Add an NGINX config [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • System-health:
    • Detect failures due to HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors. [ ]
    • Detect failures to update package sets. [ ]
    • Detect unmet dependencies. (This usually occurs with builds of Debian live-build.) [ ]
  • Misc-related changes:
    • do install systemd-ommd on jenkins. [ ]
    • fix harmless typo in squid.conf for codethink04. [ ]
    • fixup: reproducible Debian: add gunicorn service to serve /api for rebuilder-snapshot.d.o. [ ]
    • Increase codethink04 s Squid cache_dir size setting to 16 GiB. [ ]
    • Don t install systemd-oomd as it unfortunately kills sshd [ ]
    • Use debootstrap from backports when commisioning nodes. [ ]
    • Add the live_build_debian_stretch_gnome, debsums-tests_buster and debsums-tests_buster jobs to the zombie list. [ ][ ]
    • Run jekyll build with the --watch argument when building the Reproducible Builds website. [ ]
    • Misc node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]
Other changes were made as well, however, including Mattia Rizzolo fixing rc.local s Bash syntax so it can actually run [ ], commenting away some file cleanup code that is (potentially) deleting too much [ ] and fixing the html_brekages page for Debian package builds [ ]. Finally, diagnosed and submitted a patch to add a AddEncoding gzip .gz line to the tests.reproducible-builds.org Apache configuration so that Gzip files aren t re-compressed as Gzip which some clients can t deal with (as well as being a waste of time). [ ]
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:

31 October 2023

Iustin Pop: Raspberry PI OS: upgrading and cross-grading

One of the downsides of running Raspberry PI OS is the fact that - not having the resources of pure Debian - upgrades are not recommended, and cross-grades (migrating between armhf and arm64) is not even mentioned. Is this really true? It is, after all a Debian-based system, so it should in theory be doable. Let s try!

Upgrading The recently announced release based on Debian Bookworm here says:
We have always said that for a major version upgrade, you should re-image your SD card and start again with a clean image. In the past, we have suggested procedures for updating an existing image to the new version, but always with the caveat that we do not recommend it, and you do this at your own risk. This time, because the changes to the underlying architecture are so significant, we are not suggesting any procedure for upgrading a Bullseye image to Bookworm; any attempt to do this will almost certainly end up with a non-booting desktop and data loss. The only way to get Bookworm is either to create an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager, or to download and flash a Bookworm image from here with your tool of choice.
Which means, it s time to actually try it turns out it s actually trivial, if you use RPIs as headless servers. I had only three issues:
  • if using an initrd, the new initrd-building scripts/hooks are looking for some binaries in /usr/bin, and not in /bin; solution: install manually the usrmerge package, and then re-run dpkg --configure -a;
  • also if using an initrd, the scripts are looking for the kernel config file in /boot/config-$(uname -r), and the raspberry pi kernel package doesn t provide this; workaround: modprobe configs && zcat /proc/config.gz > /boot/config-$(uname -r);
  • and finally, on normal RPI systems, that don t use manual configurations of interfaces in /etc/network/interface, migrating from the previous dhcpcd to NetworkManager will break network connectivity, and require you to log in locally and fix things.
I expect most people to hit only the 3rd, and almost no-one to use initrd on raspberry pi. But, overall, aside from these two issues and a couple of cosmetic ones (login.defs being rewritten from scratch and showing a baffling diff, for example), it was easy. Is it worth doing? Definitely. Had no data loss, and no non-booting system.

Cross-grading (32 bit to 64 bit userland) This one is actually painful. Internet searches go from it s possible, I think to it s definitely not worth trying . Examples: Aside from these, there are a gazillion other posts about switching the kernel to 64 bit. And that s worth doing on its own, but it s only half the way. So, armed with two different systems - a RPI4 4GB and a RPI Zero W2 - I tried to do this. And while it can be done, it takes many hours - first system was about 6 hours, second the same, and a third RPI4 probably took ~3 hours only since I knew the problematic issues. So, what are the steps? Basically:
  • install devscripts, since you will need dget
  • enable new architecture in dpkg: dpkg --add-architecture arm64
  • switch over apt sources to include the 64 bit repos, which are different than the 32 bit ones (Raspberry PI OS did a migration here; normally a single repository has all architectures, of course)
  • downgrade all custom rpi packages/libraries to the standard bookworm/bullseye version, since dpkg won t usually allow a single library package to have different versions (I think it s possible to override, but I didn t bother)
  • install libc for the arm64 arch (this takes some effort, it s actually a set of 3-4 packages)
  • once the above is done, install whiptail:amd64 and rejoice at running a 64-bit binary!
  • then painfully go through sets of packages and migrate the set to arm64:
    • sometimes this work via apt, sometimes you ll need to use dget and dpkg -i
    • make sure you download both the armhf and arm64 versions before doing dpkg -i, since you ll need to rollback some installs
  • at one point, you ll be able to switch over dpkg and apt to arm64, at which point the default architecture flips over; from here, if you ve done it at the right moment, it becomes very easy; you ll probably need an apt install --fix-broken, though, at first
  • and then, finish by replacing all packages with arm64 versions
  • and then, dpkg --remove-architecture armhf, reboot, and profit!
But it s tears and blood to get to that point

Pain point 1: RPI custom versions of packages Since the 32bit armhf architecture is a bit weird - having many variations - it turns out that raspberry pi OS has many packages that are very slightly tweaked to disable a compilation flag or work around build/test failures, or whatnot. Since we talk here about 64-bit capable processors, almost none of these are needed, but they do make life harder since the 64 bit version doesn t have those overrides. So what is needed would be to say downgrade all armhf packages to the version in debian upstream repo , but I couldn t find the right apt pinning incantation to do that. So what I did was to remove the 32bit repos, then use apt-show-versions to see which packages have versions that are no longer in any repo, then downgrade them. There s a further, minor, complication that there were about 3-4 packages with same version but different hash (!), which simply needed apt install --reinstall, I think.

Pain point 2: architecture independent packages There is one very big issue with dpkg in all this story, and the one that makes things very problematic: while you can have a library package installed multiple times for different architectures, as the files live in different paths, a non-library package can only be installed once (usually). For binary packages (arch:any), that is fine. But architecture-independent packages (arch:all) are problematic since usually they depend on a binary package, but they always depend on the default architecture version! Hrmm, and I just realise I don t have logs from this, so I m only ~80% confident. But basically:
  • vim-solarized (arch:all) depends on vim (arch:any)
  • if you replace vim armhf with vim arm64, this will break vim-solarized, until the default architecture becomes arm64
So you need to keep track of which packages apt will de-install, for later re-installation. It is possible that Multi-Arch: foreign solves this, per the debian wiki which says:
Note that even though Architecture: all and Multi-Arch: foreign may look like similar concepts, they are not. The former means that the same binary package can be installed on different architectures. Yet, after installation such packages are treated as if they were native architecture (by definition the architecture of the dpkg package) packages. Thus Architecture: all packages cannot satisfy dependencies from other architectures without being marked Multi-Arch foreign.
It also has warnings about how to properly use this. But, in general, not many packages have it, so it is a problem.

Pain point 3: remove + install vs overwrite It seems that depending on how the solver computes a solution, when migrating a package from 32 to 64 bit, it can choose either to:
  • overwrite in place the package (akin to dpkg -i)
  • remove + install later
The former is OK, the later is not. Or, actually, it might be that apt never can do this, for example (edited for brevity): 
# apt install systemd:arm64 --no-install-recommends
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  systemd
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  systemd:arm64
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 35 not upgraded.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
dpkg: systemd: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you requested:
 systemd-sysv depends on systemd.
Removing systemd (247.3-7+deb11u2) ...
systemd is the active init system, please switch to another before removing systemd.
dpkg: error processing package systemd (--remove):
 installed systemd package pre-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 1
dpkg: too many errors, stopping
Errors were encountered while processing:
 systemd
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
But at the same time, overwrite in place is all good - via dpkg -i from /var/cache/apt/archives. In this case it manifested via a prerm script, in other cases is manifests via dependencies that are no longer satisfied for packages that can t be removed, etc. etc. So you will have to resort to dpkg -i a lot.

Pain point 4: lib- packages that are not lib During the whole process, it is very tempting to just go ahead and install the corresponding arm64 package for all armhf lib package, in one go, since these can coexist. Well, this simple plan is complicated by the fact that some packages are named libfoo-bar, but are actual holding (e.g.) the bar binary for the libfoo package. Examples:
  • libmagic-mgc contains /usr/lib/file/magic.mgc, which conflicts between the 32 and 64 bit versions; of course, it s the exact same file, so this should be an arch:all package, but
  • libpam-modules-bin and liblockfile-bin actually contain binaries (per the -bin suffix)
It s possible to work around all this, but it changes a 1 minute: 
# apt install $(dpkg -i   grep ^ii   awk ' print $2 ' grep :amrhf sed -e 's/:armhf/:arm64')
into a 10-20 minutes fight with packages (like most other steps).

Is it worth doing? Compared to the simple bullseye bookworm upgrade, I m not sure about this. The result? Yes, definitely, the system feels - weirdly - much more responsive, logged in over SSH. I guess the arm64 base architecture has some more efficient ops than the lowest denominator armhf , so to say (e.g. there was in the 32 bit version some rpi-custom package with string ops), and thus migrating to 64 bit makes more things faster , but this is subjective so it might be actually not true. But from the point of view of the effort? Unless you like to play with dpkg and apt, and understand how these work and break, I d rather say, migrate to ansible and automate the deployment. It s doable, sure, and by the third system, I got this nailed down pretty well, but it was a lot of time spent. The good aspect is that I did 3 migrations:
  • rpi zero w2: bullseye 32 bit to 64 bit, then bullseye to bookworm
  • rpi 4: bullseye to bookworm, then bookworm 32bit to 64 bit
  • same, again, for a more important system
And all three worked well and no data loss. But I m really glad I have this behind me, I probably wouldn t do a fourth system, even if forced And now, waiting for the RPI 5 to be available See you!

12 October 2023

Jonathan McDowell: Installing Debian on the BananaPi M2 Zero

My previously mentioned C.H.I.P. repurposing has been partly successful; I ve found a use for it (which I still need to write up), but unfortunately it s too useful and the fact it s still a bit flaky has become a problem. I spent a while trying to isolate exactly what the problem is (I m still seeing occasional hard hangs with no obvious debug output in the logs or on the serial console), then realised I should just buy one of the cheap ARM SBC boards currently available. The C.H.I.P. is based on an Allwinner R8, which is a single ARM v7 core (an A8). So it s fairly low power by today s standards and it seemed pretty much any board would probably do. I considered a Pi 2 Zero, but couldn t be bothered trying to find one in stock at a reasonable price (I ve had one on backorder from CPC since May 2022, and yes, I know other places have had them in stock since but I don t need one enough to chase and I m now mostly curious about whether it will ever ship). As the title of this post gives away, I settled on a Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero, which is based on an Allwinner H3. That s a quad-core ARM v7 (an A7), so a bit more oompfh than the C.H.I.P. All in all it set me back 25, including a set of heatsinks that form a case around it. I started with the vendor provided Debian SD card image, which is based on Debian 9 (stretch) and so somewhat old. I was able to dist-upgrade my way through buster and bullseye, and end up on bookworm. I then discovered the bookworm 6.1 kernel worked just fine out of the box, and even included a suitable DTB. Which got me thinking about whether I could do a completely fresh Debian install with minimal tweaking. First thing, a boot loader. The Allwinner chips are nice in that they ll boot off SD, so I just needed a suitable u-boot image. Rather than go with the vendor image I had a look at mainline and discovered it had support! So let s build a clean image: 
noodles@buildhost:~$ mkdir ~/BPI
noodles@buildhost:~$ cd ~/BPI
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ ls
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ git clone https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot.git
Cloning into 'u-boot'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 935825, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5777/5777), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1967/1967), done.
remote: Total 935825 (delta 3799), reused 5716 (delta 3769), pack-reused 930048
Receiving objects: 100% (935825/935825), 186.15 MiB   2.21 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (785671/785671), done.
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ mkdir u-boot-build
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ cd u-boot
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ git checkout v2023.07.02
...
HEAD is now at 83cdab8b2c Prepare v2023.07.02
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ make O=../u-boot-build bananapi_m2_zero_defconfig
  HOSTCC  scripts/basic/fixdep
  GEN     Makefile
  HOSTCC  scripts/kconfig/conf.o
  YACC    scripts/kconfig/zconf.tab.c
  LEX     scripts/kconfig/zconf.lex.c
  HOSTCC  scripts/kconfig/zconf.tab.o
  HOSTLD  scripts/kconfig/conf
#
# configuration written to .config
#
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/noodles/BPI/u-boot-build'
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ cd ../u-boot-build/
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot-build$ make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
  GEN     Makefile
scripts/kconfig/conf  --syncconfig Kconfig
...
  LD      spl/u-boot-spl
  OBJCOPY spl/u-boot-spl-nodtb.bin
  COPY    spl/u-boot-spl.bin
  SYM     spl/u-boot-spl.sym
  MKIMAGE spl/sunxi-spl.bin
  MKIMAGE u-boot.img
  COPY    u-boot.dtb
  MKIMAGE u-boot-dtb.img
  BINMAN  .binman_stamp
  OFCHK   .config
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot-build$ ls -l u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 noodles noodles 494900 Aug  8 08:06 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
I had the advantage here of already having a host setup to cross build armhf binaries, but this was all done on a Debian bookworm host with packages from main. I ve put my build up here in case it s useful to someone - everything else below can be done on a normal x86_64 host. Next I needed a Debian installer. I went for the netboot variant - although I was writing it to SD rather than TFTP booting I wanted as much as possible to come over the network. 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ wget https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-armhf/20230607%2Bdeb12u1/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
...
2023-08-08 10:15:03 (34.5 MB/s) -  netboot.tar.gz  saved [37851404/37851404]
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ tar -axf netboot.tar.gz
Then I took a suitable microSD card and set it up with a 500M primary VFAT partition, leaving the rest for Linux proper. I could have got away with a smaller VFAT partition but I d initially thought I might need to put some more installation files on it. 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.38.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): o
Created a new DOS (MBR) disklabel with disk identifier 0x793729b3.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-60440575, default 2048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size K,M,G,T,P  (2048-60440575, default 60440575): +500M
Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 500 MiB.
Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code or alias (type L to list all): c
Changed type of partition 'Linux' to 'W95 FAT32 (LBA)'.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (2-4, default 2):
First sector (1026048-60440575, default 1026048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size K,M,G,T,P  (534528-60440575, default 60440575):
Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 28.3 GiB.
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
$ sudo mkfs -t vfat -n BPI-UBOOT /dev/sdb1
mkfs.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
The bootloader image gets written 8k into the SD card (our first partition starts at sector 2048, i.e. 1M into the device, so there s plenty of space here): 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ sudo dd if=u-boot-build/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 seek=8
483+1 records in
483+1 records out
494900 bytes (495 kB, 483 KiB) copied, 0.0282234 s, 17.5 MB/s
Copy the Debian installer files onto the VFAT partition: 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ cp -r debian-installer/ /media/noodles/BPI-UBOOT/
Unmount the SD from the build host, pop it into the M2 Zero, boot it up while connected to the serial console, hit a key to stop autoboot and tell it to boot the installer: 
U-Boot SPL 2023.07.02 (Aug 08 2023 - 09:05:44 +0100)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC1
U-Boot 2023.07.02 (Aug 08 2023 - 09:05:44 +0100) Allwinner Technology
CPU:   Allwinner H3 (SUN8I 1680)
Model: Banana Pi BPI-M2-Zero
DRAM:  512 MiB
Core:  60 devices, 17 uclasses, devicetree: separate
WDT:   Not starting watchdog@1c20ca0
MMC:   mmc@1c0f000: 0, mmc@1c10000: 1
Loading Environment from FAT... Unable to read "uboot.env" from mmc0:1...
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   No ethernet found.
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
=> setenv dibase /debian-installer/armhf
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ kernel_addr_r  $ dibase /vmlinuz
5333504 bytes read in 225 ms (22.6 MiB/s)
=> setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200n8"
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ fdt_addr_r  $ dibase /dtbs/sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb
25254 bytes read in 7 ms (3.4 MiB/s)
=> fdt addr $ fdt_addr_r  0x40000
Working FDT set to 43000000
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ ramdisk_addr_r  $ dibase /initrd.gz
31693887 bytes read in 1312 ms (23 MiB/s)
=> bootz $ kernel_addr_r  $ ramdisk_addr_r :$ filesize  $ fdt_addr_r 
Kernel image @ 0x42000000 [ 0x000000 - 0x516200 ]
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 43000000
   Booting using the fdt blob at 0x43000000
Working FDT set to 43000000
   Loading Ramdisk to 481c6000, end 49fffc3f ... OK
   Loading Device Tree to 48183000, end 481c5fff ... OK
Working FDT set to 48183000
Starting kernel ...
At this point the installer runs and you can do a normal install. Well, except the wifi wasn t detected, I think because the netinst images don t include firmware. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to include it but ultimately ended up installing over a USB ethernet dongle, which Just Worked and was less faff. Installing firmware-brcm80211 once installation completed allowed the built-in wifi to work fine. After install you need to configure u-boot to boot without intervention. At the u-boot prompt (i.e. after hitting a key to stop autoboot): 
=> setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=LABEL=BPI-ROOT ro"
=> setenv bootcmd 'ext4load mmc 0:2 $ fdt_addr_r  /boot/sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb ; fdt addr $ fdt_addr_r  0x40000 ; ext4load mmc 0:2 $ kernel_addr_r  /boot/vmlinuz ; ext4load mmc 0:2 $ ramdisk_addr_r  /boot/initrd.img ; bootz $ kernel_addr_r  $ ramdisk_addr_r :$ filesize  $ fdt_addr_r '
=> saveenv
Saving Environment to FAT... OK
=> reset
This is assuming you have /boot on partition 2 on the SD - I left the first partition as VFAT (that s where the u-boot environment will be saved) and just used all of the rest as a single ext4 partition. I did have to do an e2label /dev/sdb2 BPI-ROOT to label / appropriately; otherwise I occasionally saw the SD card appear as mmc1 for Linux (I m guessing due to asynchronous boot order with the wifi). You should now find the device boots without intervention.

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2023

Welcome to the September 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In these reports, we 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.
Andreas Herrmann gave a talk at All Systems Go 2023 titled Fast, correct, reproducible builds with Nix and Bazel . Quoting from the talk description:

You will be introduced to Google s open source build system Bazel, and will learn how it provides fast builds, how correctness and reproducibility is relevant, and how Bazel tries to ensure correctness. But, we will also see where Bazel falls short in ensuring correctness and reproducibility. You will [also] learn about the purely functional package manager Nix and how it approaches correctness and build isolation. And we will see where Bazel has an advantage over Nix when it comes to providing fast feedback during development.
Andreas also shows how you can get the best of both worlds and combine Nix and Bazel, too. A video of the talk is available.
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed compatibility with file(1) version 5.45 [ ] and updated some documentation [ ]. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian extended support for GNU Guix [ ][ ] and updated the version in that distribution as well. [ ].
Yet another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. If you haven t been before, our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out recently, all of which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so please reach out to the organising team if you are able to help. Also note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit.
On the Reproducible Builds website, Greg Chabala updated the JVM-related documentation to update a link to the BUILDSPEC.md file. [ ] And Fay Stegerman fixed the builds failing because of a YAML syntax error.

Distribution work In Debian, this month: September saw F-Droid add ten new reproducible apps, and one existing app switched to reproducible builds. In addition, two reproducible apps were archived and one was disabled for a current total of 199 apps published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ] In addition, an extensive blog post was posted on f-droid.org titled Reproducible builds, signing keys, and binary repos .

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 operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Disable armhf and i386 builds due to Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Run diffoscope with a lower ionice priority. [ ]
  • Log every build in a simple text file [ ] and create persistent stamp files when running diffoscope to ease debugging [ ].
  • Run schedulers one hour after dinstall again. [ ]
  • Temporarily use diffoscope from the host, and not from a schroot running the tested suite. [ ][ ]
  • Fail the diffoscope distribution test if the diffoscope version cannot be determined. [ ]
  • Fix a spelling error in the email to IRC gateway. [ ]
  • Force (and document) the reconfiguration of all jobs, due to the recent rise of zombies. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Deal with a rare condition when killing processes which should not be there. [ ]
  • Install the Debian backports kernel in an attempt to address Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo fixed a call to diffoscope --version (as suggested by Fay Stegerman on our mailing list) [ ], worked on an openQA credential issue [ ] and also made some changes to the machine-readable reproducible metadata, reproducible-tracker.json [ ]. Lastly, Roland Clobus added instructions for manual configuration of the openQA secrets [ ].
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:

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