Bug#926242: jenkins.debian.org: Please test reproducibility status of Debian Installer images

[Mattia Rizzolo]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2019 at 05:50:26AM -0400, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Hey Cyril & Samuel,
> 
> > > It doesn't build the netinst/CD/DVD iso images indeed (debian-cd handles
> > > that). But it builds the initrd used there (and the netboot mini.iso).
> > 
> > Right. Check the tarball (!) produced by building src:debian-installer;
> > that's what gets installed in installer-$arch directories in the
> > archive; then consumed by debian-cd to produce “full-blown” installation
> > images.
> 
> TIL. However, as these generated files do not appear in the binary
> debian-installer package it is likely that that our testing framework
> will (after the mooted networking exception is made) entirely-
> correctly report that the src:debian-installer package is reproducible
> as its declared artifects contain only documentation. This will be
> somewhat misleading about the true reproducibility status of our installer.

It doesn't contain only documentation.
src:debian-installer also builds a
debian-installer-images_$(VERSION)_$(ARCH).tar.gz that does contain
binary stuff, including the initrd, kernel image, mini.iso, etc etc.

> However, as this would not incorporate anything that debian-cd does
> with them to produce the "full-blown" images I suspect that this will
> not be enough to cover everything. Just to underline this point in a
> silly way we would not be aware of, for example, debian-cd running
> "echo $RANDOM >> /target/ somefile.txt", even with the above hack.

Right, to cover this we would need to do a full build of the cd image.
I have no idea whatsoever how that's done (and, as others said, it's
outside of the debian-boot office, it's within debian-cd).

In the meantime I did what I mentioned,
https://salsa.debian.org/qa/jenkins.debian.net/commit/e3117ca244b230c04e324814e20c02032026a5cf
and the build for unstable/arm64 is running.

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
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