Following in the footsteps of one of my favorite Debian Developers, Chris Lamb / lamby (who is quite prolific in the reproducible builds effort within Debian), I’ve started a new project based on snapshot.debian.org (time-based snapshots of the Debian archive) and some of lamby’s work for creating reproducible Debian (debootstrap) rootfs tarballs.
The project is named “Debuerreotype” as an homage to the photography roots of the word “snapshot” and the daguerreotype process which was an early method of taking photographs. The essential goal is to create “photographs” of a minimal Debian rootfs, so the name seemed appropriate (even if it’s a bit on the “mouthful” side).
The end-goal is to create and release Debian rootfs tarballs for a given point-in-time (especially for use in Docker) which should be fully reproducible, and thus improve confidence in the provenance of the Debian Docker base images.
For more information about reproducibility and why it matters, see reproducible-builds.org, which has more thorough explanations of the why and how and links to other important work such as the reproducible builds effort in Debian (for Debian package builds).
In order to verify that the tool actually works as intended, I ran builds against seven explicit architectures (amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x) and eight explicit suites (oldstable, stable, testing, unstable, wheezy, jessie, stretch, sid).
I used a timestamp value of 2017-05-16T00:00:00Z, and skipped combinations that don’t exist (such as wheezy on arm64) or aren’t supported anymore (such as wheezy on s390x). I ran the scripts repeatedly over several days, using diffoscope to compare the results.
While doing said testing, I ran across #857803, and added a workaround. There’s also a minor outstanding issue with wheezy’s reproducibility that I haven’t had a chance to dig deep very deeply into yet (but it’s pretty benign and Wheezy’s LTS support window ends 2018-05-31, so I’m not too stressed about it).
I’ve also packaged the tool for Debian, and submitted it into the NEW queue, so hopefully the FTP Masters will look favorably upon this being a tool that’s available to install from the Debian archive as well. 😇
Anyhow, please give it a try, have fun, and as always, report bugs!