#774415: devscripts: please add the srebuild wrapper for reproducible builds

[Matt Bearup]

I have to second the issues with srebuild. We invested a lot of time to utilize this tool in our rebuilds but faced consistent build failures.
The best explanation I could find was that the snapshots referred to in the .buildinfo files had expired. That's not conclusive (the output wasn't clear on the cause of failure) nor is expired repo metadata the fault of srebuild per se. But the issue was nonetheless a blocker.
PBuilder is the most consistent build tool we've seen thus far, will have to investigate debrebuild as well.

Matt Bearup
Software Developer – CEH, CISSP, GCUX
Microsoft Azure  Compute Linux

-----Original Message-----
From: Reproducible-builds <reproducible-builds-bounces+jose.miguel=microsoft.com at alioth-lists.debian.net> On Behalf Of Johannes Schauer
Sent: Monday, October 7, 2019 8:10 AM
To: Santiago Torres Arias <santiago at nyu.edu>
Cc: Steven Chamberlain <steven at pyro.eu.org>; kpcyrd <git at rxv.cc>; Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org>; 774415 at bugs.debian.org; Reproducible Builds discussion list <reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org>; Xavier <yadd at debian.org>
Subject: Re: #774415: devscripts: please add the srebuild wrapper for reproducible builds

Hi,

Quoting Santiago Torres Arias (2019-10-07 16:58:58)
> On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 02:49:27PM +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> > The srebuild script suffers from many problems (see above). I would 
> > advice against using it in favour of debrebuild. If you want 
> > something that works "most or even half the time" then I think that debrebuild is what you want.
> > Feel free to ask me if you have any questions about the script.
> On the rebuilder side, would this work as a drop-in replacement? how 
> does it handle fetching dependencies from the debian archive and such?

it uses snapshot.debian.org to find the snapshot with the right packages and then crafts either an sbuild command line that does the right thing or outputs manual apt-get command that will install what is necessary. Pbuilder support could be added but I do not understand enough pbuilder to know how to do that.

Thanks!

cheers, josch