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It should be possible to reproduce, byte for byte, every build of every package in Debian. More information about reproducible builds in general are available at reproducible-builds.org.

Status

Reproducible builds of Debian as a whole is still not a reality, though individual reproducible builds of packages are possible and being done. So while we are making very good progress, it is a stretch to say that Debian is reproducible.

Most packages built in sid today are reproducible under a fixed build-path and environment.

We have a new control file *.buildinfo that records the build environment, see deb-buildinfo for reference. Older design drafts are here.

We have a continuous integration platform that builds and immediately rebuilds packages. With this we can detect problems related to timestamps, file ordering, CPU usage, (pseudo-)randomness and other things.

We are examining packages and sorting out common problems.

Many patches have already been submitted, and we are continuously writing new ones.

You can check which packages installed on your system are still unreproducible by using the reproducible-check script in the devscripts package.

Big outstanding issues

These are the critical items necessary to have reproducible builds for at least the required packages of Debian

/reproducible-builds/debian-rebuilder-setup/blob/master/builder/srebuild has another variant

debrebuild issues

Annoying but not major

Nice to have

Tighten up the Policy definition of "reproducible" to be stricter about environment variables and build paths.

Discuss which environment variables we should blacklist or whitelist, 876055.

#929397: ftp.d.o: please upload LTS .buildinfo files to ftp-master (this is not relevant yet, as Jessie is the LTS release, while only dpkg from Stretch and newer produces .buildinfo files.)

Also related

#895346 [devscripts] devscripts: dcmd --buildinfo is not documented

#869567 [devscripts] debsign: doesn't sign multiple .buildinfo in the same changes

#898961 [devscripts] dscverify: accept .buildinfo from a build with unsigned .dsc which later was signed

#807270 [devscripts] mk-origtargz: create reproducible tarballs and --mtime option

#852365 [sbuild] sbuild: append-to-version may overwrite incorrect .buildinfo

#923987 [sbuild] Should also send the buildinfo in the build mail

There are many other possible nice-to-haves, e.g., making builds independent of their build directory, making it possible to create archive formats (like tar.gz and zip) with different tools yet result in the same byte order, etc. Many of those are valuable, but they shouldn't distract from getting the results of reproducible builds out to users.

Even more

For more concrete tasks to be done, look at how to contribute.

Solved issues

CategoryDeveloper CategoryPackaging