[from google cache when host couldn't be reached] [original source: http://www.spectranaut.cc/?p=1] ----------------------------- Summer of Reproducible Builds ----------------------------- (May 19, 2016) Hello friend, family, fellow Outreachy participants, and the Debian community! This blog's primary purpose will be to track the progress of the Outreachy project in which I'm participating this summer :-) This post is to introduce myself and my project (working on the Debian reproducible builds project). What is Outreachy? You might not know! Let me empower you: Outreachy [[https://www.gnome.org/outreachy]] is an organization connecting woman and minorities to mentors in the free (as in freedom) software community, /and/ funding for three months to work with the mentors and contribute to a free software project. If you are a woman or minority human that likes free software, or if you know anyone in this situation, please tell them about Outreachy :-) Or put them in touch with me, I'd happily tell them more. So who am I? My name is Valerie Young. I live in the Boston Metropolitan Area (any other outreachy participants here?) and hella love free software. Some bullet pointed Val facts in rough reverse chronological order: * I run Debian but only began contributing during the Outreachy application process * If you went to DebConf2015, you might have seen me dye nine people's hair blue, blond or Debian swirl. * If you stop through Boston I could be easily convinced to dye your hair. * I worked on electronic medical records web application for the last two years (lotsa Javascriptin' and Perlin' at athenahealth) * Before that I taught a programming summer program at University of Moratuwain Sri Lanka. * Before that I got a degrees in physics and computer science at Boston University. * At BU I helped start a hackerspace where my interest in technology, free software, hacker culture, anarchy, the internet all began. * I grew up in the very fine San Francisco Bay Area. What will I be working on? Reproducible builds! [[http://reproducible-builds.org]] In the near future I'll write a "What is reproducible builds? Why is it so hot right now?" post. For now, from a high (and not technical) level, reproducible builds is a broad effort to verify that the computer executable binary programs you run on your computer come from the human readable source code they claim to. It is not presently /impossible/ to do this verification, but it's not easy, and there are a lot of nuanced computer quirks that make it difficult for the most experienced programmer and straight-up impossible for a user with no technical expertise. And without this ability to verify -- the state we are in now -- any executable piece of software could be hiding secret code. The first step towards the goal of verifiability is to make reproducibility a essential part of software development. Reproducible builds means this: when you compile a program from the source code, it should always be identical, bit by bit. If the program is always identical, you can compare your version of the software to any trusted programmer with very little effort. If it is identical, you can trust it -- if it's not, you have reason to worry. The Debian project is undergoing an effort to make the entire Debian operating system verifiable reproducible (hurray!). My outreachy-funded summer contribution involves the improving and updating tests.reproducible-builds.org -- a site that presently presently surfaces the results of reproducibility testing of several free software projects (including Debian, Fedora, coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, FreeBSD and ArchLinux). However, the design of test.r-b.org is a bit confusing, making it difficult for a user to find how to check on the reproducibility of a given package for one of the aforementioned projects, or understand the reasons for failure. Additional, the backend test results of Debian are outgrowing the original SQLite database, and many projects do not log the results of package testing at all. I hope, by the end of the summer, we'll have a more beefed-out and pretty site as well as better organized backend data :-) This summer there will be 3 other Outreachy participants working on the Debian reproducible builds project! Check out their blogs/projects: Scarlett [[http://scarlettgatelyclark.com]] Satyam [[http://satyamz.github.io]] Ceridwen [[https://reproducible.alioth.debian.org/blog/posts/people/first]] Thanks to our Debian mentors -- Lunar, Holger Levsen, and Mattia Rizzolo -- for taking us on :-)