Please review the draft for April's report

[Manuel Jacob]

On 07/05/2026 23.05, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Hi Manuel,
> 
>> I am a bit confused that
>> https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2026-04/?draft#upstream-patches
>> mostly contains what I would call downstream patches to the Debian
>> package. For most of the patches, I couldn’t find that they were
>> submitted upstream.
> 
> That's a fair critique, especially given that submitting a patch
> upstream is considered the "socially good" thing to do (and is of
> course more time-consuming). I would agree that the section, as written,
> is misleading. I will clarify this section prior to publication, and
> likely take up your suggestion of renaming the section.

Everyone will probably agree that submitting patches upstream is best, 
but I can understand why that is not always done: variety of development 
workflows, ignored patches, (at least perceived) hostility, etc. The 
middle ground that I aim for is fixing issues at the root, but 
restricting myself to packages that affect me or that I use myself.

>> Unrelated to the previous paragraph: The post lists some documentation
>> changes that I made which I wouldn’t have considered noteworthy, such as
>> changing the tense of the sentence or adding a missing word. My first
>> thought was that the summary might be automatically generated.
> 
> (To clarify this bit at least, they are only automatically generated
> in the sense that a very crude draft is first generated from the Git commit
> messages. The text is then massaged by hand.)
> 
>> Regardless of this, do you think it’s important to list all changes or
>> should I remove some minor changes listed in the post?
> 
> Well, it's important to the project that contributions of whatever size
> are acknowledged and appreciated. I'm sure there are some incredibly tiny
> ones that might not, but I'd rather err on the side of mentioning them and
> especially so when they are a new contributor—such as yourself! At the very
> least, seeing one's own name in a status report might encourage a developer
> to contribute more...

I felt sufficiently acknowledged and appreciated by the fact that you 
committed my previous patches / merge requests within short time. Thank 
you for that!

> But of course, if you would prefer some of them not to be in the report,
> please go ahead and remove them (or ask).

I’m inclined to remove references to two or three minor changes, and I’d 
like to add 
https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2026-April/148956.html, which 
should make the static library archives time-independent at least of 
Linux, even without deterministic mode. Now that you already published 
it, does it make sense to do any changes? I saw your review request too 
late.

> 
> Best wishes,
>