Live data from Hacker News

Debian must ship reproducible packages

lists.debian.org

51–60 of 178 posts

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#51
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who recently spent a lot of time on making a large C++ program entirely reproducible on 4 different OS’es, one cannot understate just how many tiny details matter here.

"overstate"

Whoops, yes. Well I hope the point came across anyway.

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#52
post #31

This is a huge achievement for Debian and the free software world. It took a while though until this was understood. In 2007 when pointing out on debian-devel that this is needed, I was still told what huge waste of time this would be. And indeed it took a huge amount of work by many people to get there, but it is well worth it.

There was no bug or attack on Debian since 2007 that reproducible packages would prevent. "Well worth it" is not correct. And it just ups the the contribution barrier to Debian higher, I already heard a lot of people complaining that contributing to Debian is hard and while in past I defended it by "they need all the checks and bounds to make sure packages play with eachother nicely", this is just step that makes it…

It makes shipping backdoors a whole lot harder, yes.

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#53
post #36

https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds has some more infos; some is outdated, but it also has a chart showing how many packages are built in the CI, and how many of those are reproducible builds. (Orange = FTBR = "failed to build reproducibly") I'm not good at reading numbers from charts, but I'd guess it's a few percent (4-5ish?).

all I get is this: > Forbidden > You are not allowed to access this! (yes, with HTML tags on display) :) EDIT: I also found a "I Challenge Thee" page in history. did I just get blocked by antibot measures? why???

Do you have JavaScript disabled? They put one of those anti-scraper things on it.

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#56

Has anyone fought Microsoft Visual Studio successfully to produce reproducible builds of C++ programs? From what I have heard, it is one of the worst contexts to do it.

Well, you can't build MSVS yourself, reproducibly or otherwise, so this is a less appealing endeavor I would think.

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#57
post #31

This is a huge achievement for Debian and the free software world. It took a while though until this was understood. In 2007 when pointing out on debian-devel that this is needed, I was still told what huge waste of time this would be. And indeed it took a huge amount of work by many people to get there, but it is well worth it.

There was no bug or attack on Debian since 2007 that reproducible packages would prevent. "Well worth it" is not correct. And it just ups the the contribution barrier to Debian higher, I already heard a lot of people complaining that contributing to Debian is hard and while in past I defended it by "they need all the checks and bounds to make sure packages play with eachother nicely", this is just step that makes it…

Reproducible builds are applicable not only to respond to ‘attacks’, a subject you seem to be bikeshedding, but also for other reasons too.

Anyone having to maintain a code base or a distributed fleet of devices will gain from this decision, immensely, as their operational periods come and go.

Reproducible builds are about longevity as much as they are about security.

Please don’t make bold claims about ‘no reason and little benefit’ while demonstrating ignorance of this hard fact: reproducible builds should have been the norm, in computing, from the get-go.

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#58
post #45

I wonder why this is a thing nowadays. I use yocto for embedded devices and it was almost a no-brainer to implement reproducible builds. I can also easily enable Debian package management, so everything is already available.

What do you mean why is it a thing nowadays?

Reproducible builds are an essential method in industrial computing - Debian isn’t at the forefront of this, it is merely adopting industry wide techniques also applied to other operating systems in use in long-term and safety-related applications.

Certainly, a lot of the hard work of the Yocto and Debian developers is already in your hands.

What is interesting is that this is now being applied in a more forward-focused policy by the Debian developers, that it will now be the norm rather than an option…

Re: Debian must ship reproducible packages

#60
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"overstate"

Whoops, yes. Well I hope the point came across anyway.

it's funny that as a non-native speaker, I have to check with Gemini about how "cannot overstate" is used

I also asked Gemini whether we express ourselves that way in my mother tongue (Mandarin), and yes, we do, but it came off as being too formal way of speaking. We don't normally use it (I'm not from China/Taiwan though)

Post reply on HN