<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div>On Thu, Mar 2, 2023, at 02:09, John Gilmore wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><div>I have been surprised at how much effort has gone into "diffoscope" as a<br></div><div>total fraction of the Reproducible Builds effort.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><div>How do you know?<br></div><div><br></div></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><div>Perhaps it is a case<br></div><div>akin to the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight where he<br></div><div>can see, rather than in the dark where he dropped them. (It's easier to<br></div><div>hack diffoscope than to hack thousands of irreproducible packages.)<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I suspect it might be a visibility effect, but the other way around: diffoscope issues may be more likely to be discussed on this list than issues with individual packages. If you look at the monthly reports there's a healthy batch of distro&upstream work happening each month, and even there it might be skewed: it's much easier to enumerate the changes to diffoscope, than it is to gather reproducibility work from all over the internet.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I, for one, spend *way* more time fixing irreproducible packages (where diffoscope is an amazing tool) than working on diffoscope itself (I only did some issue reporting and testing). I rarely post about it here, and I've been really bad at making it visible in the monthly reports as well - I should get back into that habit ;).<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Kind regards,<br></div><div><br></div><div>Arnout<br></div><div><br></div></body></html>