Write up of the reproducible summit

Three members of the Arch Linux team attended the Reproducible Build Summit 2018 in Paris this week to work together with the reproducible ecosystem to work on reproducible build issues. The other participants where from a lot of different projects and companies such as Debian, NixOS, Guix, Alpine, openSUSE, OpenWrt, Google, Microsoft and many more. The summit was organized by letting attendees work with a small subset of the attendees on issues which they are interested in and trying to find solutions and discuss ideas. At the end of the day there time for hacking together on solutions. The event was very open and there was a lot of collaboration between projects which have different goals!

The Arch Team has worked on the following topics:

Packaging & updating more reproducible build tools in our repos, disorderfs was updated to the latest version and disorderfs was updated after a pytest fix from Chris Lamb for diffoscope. Reprotest, the tool to test if something is reproducible has been added to [community].

A note has been made that we should investigate if the Arch ISO is reproducible. At least one possible issue is that squashfs images are not reproducible and Arch should consider switching to squashfskit which creates reproducible squashfs images.

Discussed adding a JSON endpoint for fetching the reproducible build status of Arch Linux packages on tests.reproducible-builds.org.

Sharing reproducible build issues cross distros.

Discussed how to rebuild Arch Linux packages and test if they are reproducible.

Discussed how to verify before installing a package if a package is reproducible.

Debian's Kernel is reproducible, but Arch's isn't. We started investigating why ours isn't reproducible, as one goal is to get [core] reproducible as first repo.

Investigate PGO (profile guided optimisation) reproducibility issues for Firefox and Python.

And much more! It has left us with a lot of "homework" to continue making Arch Linux more reproducible!

A huge thanks to the organizers and sponsors of the Reproducible build summit!