[Reproducible-builds] automated diffoscope for parallel build bugs

[Jeremy Bicha]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Chris Lamb <lamby at debian.org> wrote:
> Very interesting bug; thanks for sharing.

I noticed that bug a while ago, so gedit in unstable/testing currently
explicitly opts out of parallel building.

> 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?

Yes, I propose that one of the builds disable parallelism entirely to
catch this sort of bug. Since parallel builds are becoming default in
more places, it would be great if we could find these bugs.

> 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.

Setting up my own install of reproducible-builds.org sounds like a lot
more work than I was hoping for.

I want to go ahead and push parallel-building-enabled-by-default
forward in pkg-gnome, but I (obviously) don't want to manually
diffoscope the several hundred packages involved.

Thanks,
Jeremy