July 31st 2019

Free software activities in July 2019

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during July 2019 (previous month):


Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws almost all software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

The initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella, allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter.


This month:

I spent significant amount of time working on our website this month, including:

I also made the following changes to our tooling:

diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.


strip-nondeterminism

strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build.

Debian LTS

This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS (ELTS) project.


Uploads

I also made "sourceful" uploads to unstable to ensure migration to testing after recent changes that prevent maintainer-supplied packages entering bullseye for bfs (1.5-3), redis (5:5.0.5-2), lastpass-cli (1.3.3-2), python-daiquiri (1.5.0-3) and I finally performed a sponsored upload of elpy (1.29.1+40.gb929013-1).


FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 19 packages: aiorwlock, bolt, caja-mediainfo, cflow, cwidget, dgit, fonts-smc-gayathri, gmt, gnuastro, guile-gcrypt, guile-sqlite3, guile-ssh, hepmc3, intel-gmmlib, iptables, mescc-tools, nyacc, python-pdal & scheme-bytestructures. I additionally filed a bug against scheme-bytestructures for having a seemingly-incomplete debian/copyright file. (#932466)




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