[rb-general] Core Debian reproducibility: 57% and rising!

[Daniel Shahaf]

David A. Wheeler wrote on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 06:22 -0400:
> 
> >I would skip the numbers or put them last in the news bit.
> >Or mention our non-real-world (higher) reproducibility percentage as
> >well, otherwise this is plain confusing, despite the TL;DR explaination
> >that follows.
> 
> 
> I like the idea of including the non real world percentage as well, and 
> explaining the difference. Any suggestions on text that would do that?

This is as far as I got, based on your text:

---

For a long time, over 93% of all source packages in the Debian archive
(25561 out of 27427) have been known to be [reproducible in a laboratory
environment][1].  Last week, Vagrant Cascadian [probed the package
archives][2] and found that in current Debian Sid, **57% of the binary
packages installed in a minimal system** are verifiably reproducible (88
out of 154).

While 57% is a lower figure, it is a more substantial statistic: it is
not a measure of packages that behave well under carefully controlled
conditions, but of actual "real world" Debian artifacts, that get
installed on end-user systems, that have successfully been reproduced in
the field.  Furthermore, this statistic only considers essential core
packages that are installed on all Debian systems.

[1]: https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/buster/index_suite_amd64_stats.html
[2]: (link to this thread)

---

It says "installed on end-user system" so it might be better to use
figures for buster, if we have them.