Many CI reprodibility runs failing with FTBFS on 2nd build

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2026-05-05, Peter Blackman wrote:
> Looks to me like a systemic issue
> with CI reproducibility.
>
> 2nd runs are failing across the board with logs like
>
> I: Adding a custom variable just for the fun of it...
> I: Changing /bin/sh to bash
> '/bin/sh' -> '/bin/bash'
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jun  7 00:21 /bin/sh -> /bin/bash
> I: Setting pbuilder2's login shell to /bin/bash
> /tmp/hooks/D01_modify_environment: 29: usermod: not found

Sorry about that!

At one point it affected over 40% of the build results for
unstable/amd64, and started affecting the builds for forky recently as
well...

I noticed it a little over a week ago in unstable, but sometimes
glitches like this "sort themselves out" ... this obviously did not!

Should be worked around as of yesterday when this commit was deployed:

  https://salsa.debian.org/qa/jenkins.debian.net/-/commit/a741f156dff8dd2f2a0b6531756865c958ef7fd7

It will take a while for things to get back to normal... but future
builds should start working...

Something, not sure what exactly, caused "passwd" to no longer be part
of the base tarball, possibly the indirect results of aiming for a
smaller and smaller base set, and the last thing depending on "adduser"
probably dropped it...

There has been a lot of focus and excitement on the "new" and important
reproduce.debian.net, which actually verifies against the archive, which
we have wanted to be able to do for so many years! It really is great!

The older tests.reproducible-builds.org serves other purposes
(e.g. testing toolchain regressions and several important variations
such as systematic time variation) and still needs some attention now
and again!


live well,
  vagrant
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