[Soc-coordination] Status Report for Bootstrappable Debian, Week 1

[Peter Pentchev]

Hi,

The first week of work on the Bootstrappable Debian project was mainly
dedicated to setting up the tools and the workflow that I intend to use
for modifying packages for limited builds (drop some build dependencies,
consequently do not build all the binary packages) in the "stage1" build
profile.

As suggested by Wookey, I set up a section in the Debian Wiki's
"Circular Build Dependencies" page containing a table to track the
progress of my changes, starting with the packages identified by
Johannes Schauer and Wookey as the feedback arc set:
https://wiki.debian.org/CircularBuildDependencies#The_Feedback_Arc_Set
To start with, I added links to the Git repository of my work on
src:krb5 which was done as proof of intent during the GSoC application
period.  Later in the week I also added links to the newly-converted
src:flex package.

As part of the flex conversion I updated my own 'shell script snippets'
collection (https://gitorious.org/sssnips) with a couple of tools to
make it easier to check whether the binary packages built in the stage1
profile are indeed identical to the ones built in the normal way:
- updated a couple of the scripts, including the "declean" one (remove
  the pkg_ver_arch.* files in the parent directory after a build,
  leaving only the pkg_ver.orig.tar.* archive to be able to build again)
- finally started tracking there the "qdc" script that I always use to
  clean up after a build, be it a successful or unsuccessful one
- wrote a new tool, dpkg-compare, to compare not just the list of files,
  but also the file contents (using the md5sums control file), so that
  it's easier to catch undesirable changes due to dropped dependencies
- wrote a new tool, pbuilder-gather, to gather all the files generated
  during a pbuilder build into a single directory so that it's easier to
  compare with previous build results using dpkg-compare

In my opinion, this first week was mostly dipping my toes in and testing
the water, setting up a workflow, getting used to the idea of first
checking if a package build is reproducible (the flex one isn't, a
couple of the files contain embedded timestamps) and then checking if
the dropped dependencies introduce new differences beyond the
normal unreproducible build ones.  This is the main reason for the fact
that no bugs have been filed yet, either against src:krb5 or against
src:flex; I'm still figuring out whether this is the best way to do it.
In the future, I certainly expect to be able to convert more than one
new package per week :)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
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