This is report on my previous week activities with Debian Reproducible-Builds.

In last 10 days, I had build different Debain packages at my own using prebuilder to experience the reproducibility issues. I am thankful to deki and Lunar for suggesting me to do that task. Based on this experience, I managed to find more use cases for –hide=profiles specification.

I also researched differences of different unreproducible Debian packages on http://tests.reproducible-builds.org . There are many packages available for examination.

In brief I did following tasks:

• I worked on –hide=profiles specification. Mostly, I tried to find use cases.
• I made changes to https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/HideProfilesSpecification added detailed information in each use case.
• Read documentation on argcomplete python module and had some hands on experience with module. Purpose of doing this was to add argument completion feature to Diffoscope. pabs had filed bug report for this #826711. I am implementing this feature and discussing issues with pabs as well as researching diffs side-by-side to generate more use cases. Here, Thanks to pabs for guidance and support :)
• I went through different software to see how they are ignoring the stuff. Those are following:
  • apkdiff
  • pkg-diff
  • tar

Upcoming week will be an important as well as fun week because I will be implementing the use cases. Right now, I am currently looking at different softwares which ignores stuff and taking notes of it. So that, it will help me during implementing solution of use cases. I am also looking forward to feedback from community on use cases and CLI interfaces. Have a great week :)