Quick look at Reproducible Builds progress in Debian

[Vagrant Cascadian]

I just wanted to spend a few moments looking over the progress
Reproducible Builds has made in Debian over the last few release cycles.

The percentage of packages that are reproducible admittedly doesn't look
amazing, even though there has been steady progress:

  stretch  93.8%
  buster   94.1%
  bullseye 94.9%
  unstable 83.7%

So, we've seen ~1% increase in reproducible builds over two release
cycles since stretch, and despite being steady progress overall, it
might feel a bit disappointing... but we also have a somewhat higher bar
for bullseye (e.g. varied merged /usr) and much higher standard for
unstable (e.g. varied build path).


Yet a look at the overall numbers of packages that are reproducible by
release:

  stretch  23204
  buster   26740
  bullseye 28560
  unstable 26456

Over the last two releases, that is over 5000 additional packages that
are reproducible. There are more *reproducible* packages in bullseye
than the *total* number of packages in buster! Unstable has nearly the
same number of reproducible packages as buster, despite a wider variety
of variations, and more than 3000 more than stretch.


And while we track issues by how many source packages are reproducible,
I am fairly confident that many packages have had partial fixes applied
that result in more reproducible binary packages, even if not all of the
packages of a given source are reproducible. We unfortunately do not
track that to demonstrate numbers, but I know it has happened for at
least a few patches I've submitted.


So, while Reproducible Builds in Debian is dealing with the challenges
of a "last mile" problem (please forgive my use of an anacronistic
measuring system), we're also keeping pace with thousands of newly
introduced packages yet still gradually and steadily pulling ever so
slightly further ahead!


For reference, I'm just looking at and visually comparing:

  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/stretch/index_suite_amd64_stats.html
  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/buster/index_suite_amd64_stats.html
  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/bullseye/index_suite_amd64_stats.html
  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/unstable/index_suite_amd64_stats.html


Keep building reproducibly!


live well,
  vagrant
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