This is the first blog post among series of posts which I will be writing throughout the summer about Google Summer of Code 2016 under Debian Reproducible Builds Experience.

Introduction:

I am Satyam Zode I am a final year Computer Science student (Satyam_z on IRC). I live in Pune, India (GMT +5:30). I am pursuing my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Pune. I have been programming for the past 4 years. I am well versed in C/C++, Python3, and Golang. My Alioth and Github handles are satyamz-guest and satyamz respectively. I have been using GNU/Linux and free software from last four years. I am an open source enthusiast and I have been following Hacker culture since past three years.

Accepted into Google Summer of Code 2016 under Debian Project:

I am glad that I have got an opportunity to contribute to the Debian Project via Google Summer of Code 2016. I am accepted for project Improving diffoscope tool and reproducibility of Debian packages. This Summer and beyond I will be working with Debian Reproducible Builds team to improve the debbugging tool called Diffoscope (previously known as debbindiff). Thanks a bunch to Debian community, Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and reproducible-builds folks for giving me this opportunity. Here is my GSoC'16 Proposal. And Yay! It really feels great.

Project details:

I will be working on Diffoscope tool which is debbugging tool developed under reproducible-builds effort. Basically, Diffoscope compares two files and shows the difference in text and html format. Diffoscope is mainly developed to compare two Debian packages which may consist of binary files, tar files, text files etc. Diffoscope helps to identify difference between two Debian packages with respect to timestamps, file ordering etc. Diffoscope will try to get to the bottom of what makes files or directories different. It will recursively unpack archives of many kinds and transform various binary formats into more human readable form to compare them. It can compare two tarballs, ISO images, Debian packages or PDF just as easily. Diffoscope helps to identify the reproduciblity of Debian packages. During this summer I will be improving Diffoscope. I will be mainly working on:

• Finish Parallel processing part.
• Add command line option - -ignore-profile to allow users to ignore arbitrary differences.
• perform fuzzy-matching across archives.
• Add new file comparators to extend support of diffoscope for new file types.

My next blog post will be regarding community bonding. Thanks for reading :)