Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #182

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 14 and Saturday October 20 2018:

• Jelle van der Waa posted a reminder on our mailing list that there is an IRC meeting on 23th of October at 16:00 UTC (agenda).

• Peter Wu filed a bug report against the CMake build tool to avoid embedding the build directory in an executable’s RPATH.

• Chris Lamb add support for comparing OCaml files via ocamlobjinfo to diffoscope, our in-depth “diff-on-steroids” utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages closing Debian bug #910542. In addition, he added a note on how to regenerate the debian/tests/control.in file if it gets out of sync.

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann added two tests to disorderfs (our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into filesystems) in order to check for various issues around the futimens and utimensat syscalls (1, 2). This was also filed as Debian bug #911281

• Chris Lamb made a number of changes to our website, including adding his recent NYU class talk, Holger’s diffoscope talk the MirageOS hack retreat and Mariusz Zaborski’s BSidesWarsaw 2018 talk to the Resources page. Holger Levsen also made some changes to the website, including updating the list of projects attending the Reproducible Builds summit in Paris in December.

• This week, Chris Lamb added 25 package reviews, and 12 were updated & 13 were removed, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. In addition, Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a reference to a fix for the translations_missing_in_desktop_files issue.

• Chris Murphy started an email thread on the BtrFs filesystem’s mailing list asking about reproducible builds with BtrFs “seed” feature.

Another reminder that the Reproducible Builds summit will be taking place between 11th—13th December 2018 Paris at Mozilla’s offices. If you are interested in attending, please send an email to holger@layer-acht.org. More details can be found on the corresponding event page of our website.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • grub2 (fix mtime, file readdir(2))
  • hawk2/rubygem-sprockets (filed: mtime + other)
  • maildir-utils (emacs .elc varies from parallelism)
  • nfoview (merged, sort Python glob / readdir(2))
  • python-gobject (merged, sort python listdir / readdir(2))
  • python (bug: FTBFS-2038)
  • scons (merged, date)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #911125 filed against lmfit-py (randomness).
  • #911234 filed against mp3fs (forwarded upstream, use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)

Test framework development

There were a large number of updates to our Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org by Holger Levsen this week, including:

• Improve the wording on the Reproducible OpenWrt pages.
• Don’t fail if a log file vanishes during a long running find(1) command.
• Automatically fix .rbuild files with the wrong permissions.
• Fix the disorderfs and strip-nondeterminism jobs to test the master branch, not the debian branch.
• Add debug output to tp the reproducible OpenWrt build process to diagnose a statistics issue.
• Only recreate the Jenkins job health page if the jobs have actually changed.
• Do not reinvent nproc(1). Thanks to Andreas Beckmann for the hint.
• Refactor PNG image generation.
• Update various copyright years.

Misc.

This week’s edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.