Bug#1019742: should reproducible builds vary nocheck?

[Holger Levsen]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2024 at 10:51:28AM +0000, Chris Lamb wrote:
> I like the idea of varying nocheck, or at least exploring the concept.

same here.
 
> From personal experience, I think it will actually cause a
> surprisingly large number of packages to become unreproducible. Many
> many packages generate stuff during test runs which then gets
> installed into a binary package. I can only reliably come across these
> when the output is non-deterministic, but given how many instances of
> this there are, I suspect there are a lot more packages that generate
> *deterministic* stuff.

I suspect the same.

> Just a small thing regarding the two bugs you suggest merging:
> 
> #786644 is filed against jenkins.debian.org (ie. the service powering
> tests.reproducible-builds.org), whilst #1019742 is filed against the
> reprotest package. It is not actually that obvious, but
> tests.reproducible-builds.org does not use reprotest to do its varations,
> so it is "technically" correct that they are different bugs.

indee. and thanks for pointing this out.

> They, of course, could still be merged, or be used in the "add the
> option" and "enabled by default" schema as you suggest. But just to
> remind anyone following these bugs that reprotest is technically a
> different Thing from tests.reproducible-builds.org.

and then there is https://reproduce.debian.net now, which
aims to reproduce Debian binary packages distributed via deb.debian.org
and which has become almost trivial to setup, as documented in
https://reproduce.debian.net/rebuilderd-setup.html currently.

Once it has become *really* trivial to setup, that is once rebuilderd
has been packaged as well and available in trixie, setting up a
rebuilderd instance will be trivial and configuring it to rebuild
Debian with nocheck should also be trivial then. And then, there
will be hard data showing how many packages cannot be reproduced when
rebuilding with nocheck while they can without nocheck.

The machine specs to rebuild Debian on amd64 in 4-6 weeks should roughly be 
a dedicated system with a modern CPU with 64gb RAM and 500gb diskspace.

rust-rebuilderd-common, rust-rebuild-ctl and rust-rebuilderd-worker are
already packaged and available in trixie. rust-rebuilderd is not there yet,
but installing with git clone and make install is also rather trivial (and
documented in above URL). So basically anyone could set this up *now*.
And I'd also be glad to help!

.oO( all I want for xmas is a rebuilderd setup for every Debian arch. ;)


-- 
cheers,
	Holger

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it is to act with yesterdays logic. (Peter Drucker)
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