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Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #185

Published: Nov 13, 2018.


Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday November 4 and Saturday November 10 2018:

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

diffoscope development

diffoscope is our in-depth “diff-on-steroids” utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages. This week, version 105 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions already covered in previous weeks as well as new ones from:

Website updates

There were a large number of changes to our website this week:

In addition to that we had contributions from Deb Nicholson, Chris Lamb, Georg Faerber, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo et al. on the press release regarding joining the Software Freedom Conservancy:

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 (see below). The most important work was done behind the scenes outside of Git which was a long debugging session to find out why the Jenkins Java processes were suddenly consuming all of the system resources whilst the machine had a load of 60-200. This involved temporarily removing all 1,300 jobs, disabling plugins and other changes. In the end, it turned out that the underlying SSH/HDD performance was configured poorly and, after this was fixed, Jenkins returned to normal.

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo fixed an issue in the web-based package rescheduling tool by encoding a string before passing to subprocess.run and to fix the parsing of the “issue” selector option.


This week’s edition was written by Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Oskar Wirga, Santiago Torres, Snahil Singh & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.


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