[Reproducible-builds] [Reproducible] On making Stretch self-contained IRT to reproducibility

[Niels Thykier]

Hi,

The topic of rebuilding all of Stretch to make it self-contained (IRT to
reproducibility) was brought up on the release IRC meeting today (topic
originally proposed in [1]).  The highlights:

 * To my knowledge, only people from the release team were present.
   - The meeting minutes are available at [2].

 * We had at least 3 concerns brought up:
   - Possible lack of buildd resources to do the rebuild.  Notably, due
     to Multi-Arch:same we would generally need to do the rebuild on all
     architectures.
   - In our current infrastructure, arch:all packages cannot trivially
     be rebuilt.
   - Build-dependency loops would need to be handled somehow.

 * At this point, we do *not* think it is feasible to do a full rebuild
   of the archive for Stretch to make it self-contained (IRT to
   reproducibility).

 * We are currently (also) awaiting better dak support so we know what
   the support of .buildinfo etc. will be like.


Please note that we may /not/ have fleshed out all problems during the
meeting.


On the arch:all rebuild-ability
===============================

Rebuilding arch:all packages currently requires manual uploads of all
packages.  While we have "arch:all" buildds, we do *not* have support
for binNMUing arch:all packages in general.  A very limiting factor is
the substvar handling, which assumes that the version of the arch:all
package does not change during binNMUs (e.g. by using ${source:Version}).


Thanks,
~Niels

[1]
https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/reproducible-builds/Week-of-Mon-20151102/003828.html

[2]
http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-release/2016/debian-release.2016-02-24-18.59.html


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