The event was organized without a fixed schedule, rather the
organizers implemented a scheme wherein participants would form around
topics that interested them.
Most sessions had somebody take notes, the reports are going to be
published in a “Reports” section on the event page soon:
https://reproducible-builds.org/events/paris2018/
Here I wrote down some interesting one-on-one conversations I had over
the three days.
2018-12-11
-
Ludovic
Met Ludovic, the founder of the Guix project. Asked him how and why
he started (2012, he’s a Guile maintainer and played around with
driving Nix with Guile). -
Bernhard
OpenSuse employee who works on pushing reproducibility patches
upstream. He has a suite of scripts to detect these issues.
GitHub - bmwiedemann/reproducibleopensuse: scripts to help make opensuse builds reproducible -
Repeatr
Generic stack to repeat containerized computations, via runc &al.
Not really sure what it does or what’s it for, and the contributors
weren’t able to give a practical use-case.
GitHub - polydawn/repeatr: Repeatr: Reproducible, hermetic Computation. Provision containers from Content-Addressable snapshots; run using familiar containers (e.g. runc); store outputs in Content-Addressable form too! JSON API; connect your own pipelines! (Or, use github.com/polydawn/stellar for pipelines!) -
Nix vs. Guile
Talked to a few people (Eelco, Ludovic, …) about the differences.- DSL vs EDSL
Guile has a giant advantage in tooling, because everything is a
Scheme library, and to build a tool (even just experiment) you
have one unified environment at your fingertips.
- DSL vs EDSL
-
Rep.B. Tooling
Riseup Pad
Quite comprehensive, especially reprotest is nice (can test any
command for reproducibility!). Not packaged for nixpkgs yet!
Maybe set up automatic CI for these tests? Hydra?
There should be a matrix of which tools is packaged on which
distribution already.
2018-12-12
- Hacksession: Package Matrix for Tools — reproducible-builds.org
I hosted two hacking sessions to show & improve the distribution of
Rep. Builds tools on various distros. Writeup here:
Riseup Pad
(and later in the agenda) - Typesystem for JSON
Met a person who is writing a typesystem for JSON files for some
IPFS-related project. Since I had already done something similar
for nix expressions
(https://github.com/Profpatsch/nixpkgs/blob/43a5946dd3f2059f960f517f929b174f7099094d/lib/types-simple.nix)
I explained my implementation. An interesting question that came
up: What if you don’t want the type specifications to be literal
functions in an untyped setting, but make them data (e.g. by
representing them in JSON) that can only be combined in a certain
way.
2018-12-13
- Missed the first part, joined after lunch (Appartment search)
It was mostly a hacking session in the afternoon.
Since I had to organize additional appartment-related things, I
wasn’t able to continue working on the tools matrix very much.
The event ended with a thank-you session & continued hacking while
people were slowly leaving. - Tansy
Tansy is working on a build system similar to bazel, pants. It was
created by ex-Googlers and used primarily for its excellent Scala
support (because sbt is a horror show).
I brought up the notion that build tools tend to be able to
integrate support for different languages, but don’t play fair when
it comes to integrate themselves into other build systems. For
example nix assumes access to /nix, bazel uses a daemon with long
startup time and makes it hard to inject e.g. a prebuilt protobuf.