Hi Paul,
sorry for the late reply.
On Samstag, 13. Juni 2015, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
you've seen https://reproducible.debian.net/u-boot ?
This seems very minimalistic, but it's good to see U-Boot was given some attention already!
:-)
but maybe you can explain why u-boot needs more reproducibility testing than what there currently is. i'm definitly interested and not opposed, even though I think there shoukd be good reasons to treat some software specially.
The point is to make U-Boot reproducible for all possible targets, not only the few ones that are supported by U-Boot.
I think your sentence is missing some word…?!?
I think this requires some extra infrastructure. In that sense, it is very similar to Coreboot.
(also please note that we currently only have amd64 hw to run our tests on.)
The problem is the same as Coreboot, which uses its own toolchain to build images. We don't need to have native armhf builds for U-Boot, testing with the armhf toolchain that is in Debian should be enough.
I see.
I understand, this works out nicely because all the work on Coreboot will be inherited by Libreboot. However, on U-Boot, the work to bring reproducible builds has to take place initially. I know for a fact that parts of the code use things like __FILE__ or timestamps.
Ah.
That makes sense. For U-Boot, it will certainly make sense for the distributions packaging it. I'm the main developer of Replicant, the fully free version of Android, and it would definitely be useful to have a smartphone on which we can trust that the bootloader can be built in a reproducible manner (and checked after being installed).
indeed!
All this said, if you send me patches, I will probably deploy them as I'm very curious and more reproducibility efforts are good :-) We can can always decide to remove or move them later.
I wish to make all contributions upstream. What would really help at first would be to have all targets built regularly to see where work is needed. This is where I think the Debian infrastructure could help, in a similar way as what was started for Coreboot.
can you point me to a how to explaining this or tell me those steps, starting with "git clone..."?
cheers, Holger