Monthly status update about reproducible live-build ISO images

[Roland Clobus]

Hello lists,

here is the 17th update of the status for reproducible live-build ISO 
images [1].

Single line summary: Work is needed when non-free-firmware is activated.

Reproducible status:
* All major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm and sid 
for images without firmware support
* When non-free-firmware is activated, some non-reproducible files are 
generated

My activities in February:
* Not much progress, I've been busy IRL
* No new modifications to live-setup, waiting for review
* Many of the open MRs from last month have been uploaded
* I've started working on non-free-firmware

Work to be done:
* Live images are not generated officially by Debian yet
** Might need additional changes in 'live-setup'
** Needs communication to coordination the next steps
** This will be the next main target
* Update the support for non-free firmware
* More investigation is required to provide long-term reproducibility, 
because the live image will be generated without using a snapshot server
* Review the results of the generated ISO images in my local openQA instance
* Add a test for the Calamares installer in openQA
* Adjust the content of the live-build image
** Make the boot menu more similar to the live-wrapper menu
** Add a 'persistent' option (as seen in Kali)
** Keep the accessibility improvements made in the live-wrapper boot menu
** Verify the package lists
*** e.g. the Debian Reference is installed for es and it, but not en
* Bug triaging for issues reported against live-build

Unchanged, but low priority due to [5], patch available but not released 
yet:
* texlive-base: Reported differences in the generated ls-R [2]
* texlive-binaries: Randomness in .fmt files due to Lua hash seeds [3]
* texlive-binaries: updmap creates a logfile with the timestamps of 
files that it just has generated [4]
* Priority is now very low, since the package is not used in live images 
any more
** This section will be removed from my next report

With kind regards,
Roland Clobus

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleInstalls/LiveImages
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1003449
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1009196
[4] 
https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/commit/f1a98e4da62c3551f523553c6e23774aaf5e41b4
[5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1006472
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