[Reproducible-builds] automated diffoscope for parallel build bugs

[Chris Lamb]

Dear Jeremy,

Thanks for getting in touch; glad you are finding diffoscope useful!

> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/770100

Very interesting bug; thanks for sharing.

> Going a step further, maybe reproducible-builds.org should do this
> check since it seems it would be relatively easy to implement there.

Indeed. The concept of reproducibility is indeed what you are after here
rather than "checking with diffoscope", if only because the former can
be done deterministically and without human intervention.

However, I may be misunderstanding your query as the tests we run as part
of reproducible-builds.org(powered by jenkins.debian.net) against Debian
pakages do actually vary the _level_ of parallelism right now. Perhaps you
thinking about disabling parallelism entirely for one of the builds?

If you feel like you want to have more control over the builds--for example,
building your git HEAD on push--then I would first persue contributing to (or
bribing Holger/another into…) supporting this on the jenkins.debian.net server.

This is because there are quite a few "boring" admin tasks that need doing
such as keeping the chroots up-to-date, which you would just be tediously
reimplementing, debugging and maintaining by yourself.

In addition, you would also need to ensure you were using our patched dpkg,
etc. which -- whilst going away Real Soon Now -- is not something we really
recommend or want others to be using.

I hope I understood your question and/or hope some of my reply helped. :)


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-