Does diffoscope compares disk partitions

[Arnout Engelen]

On Thu, Mar 2, 2023, at 02:09, John Gilmore wrote:
> I have been surprised at how much effort has gone into "diffoscope" as a
> total fraction of the Reproducible Builds effort.

How do you know?

> Perhaps it is a case
> akin to the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight where he
> can see, rather than in the dark where he dropped them.  (It's easier to
> hack diffoscope than to hack thousands of irreproducible packages.)

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.

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 ;).


Kind regards,

Arnout
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