March 31st 2020

Free software activities in March 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during March 2020 (previous month):

In addition, I did even more hacking on the Lintian static analysis tool for Debian packages, including:


Reproducible builds

One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

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:

In our tooling, I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including preparing and uploading version 138 to Debian:

The Reproducible Builds project also operates a fully-featured and comprehensive Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, I reworked the web-based package rescheduling tool to:


Debian LTS

This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 8 hours on its sister Extended LTS project.

You can find out more about the Debian LTS project via the following video:


Debian Uploads

For the Debian Privacy Maintainers team I requested that the pyptlib package be removed from the archive (#953429) as well as uploading onionbalance (0.1.8-6) to fix test failures under Pytest 3.x (#953535) and a new upstream release of nautilus-wipe.

Finally, I sponsored an upload of bilibop (0.6.1) on behalf of Yann Amar.




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