I travelled to Paris over the last week for the Reproducible Builds workshop there, as well as a GNU Guix meetup on the day before. All in all, it's been awesome, if a little tiring.

It was reassuring to spend some time with others who care enough about free software and related things to take a number of days out to come together and work on reproducible builds and related topics.

Monday, Guix meeting at Inria

I'm very thankful to Ludovic and Inria to organising and hosting the event.

I've been looking at code review and automated testing in the last few weeks, and I think the discussions around that did move things forward.

The issue of substitute delivery for GNU Guix was also discussed a few times, and at the Reproducible Builds summit, the presence of some people who were very knowledgeable about IPFS (the Inter Planetary File System) at the summit were very helpful.

Tuesday, Start of the Reproducible Builds workshop

The morning was filled with some knowledge sharing sessions, which was great for me, as this was my first reproducible builds summit.

I know now a little more about the Reproducible Builds organisations infrastructure, and I discussed the technical side of getting data regarding the reproducible of Guix packages in to the Reproducible Builds database.

The agenda and notes for the event are available here.

Wednesday

In the morning, I talked to others in the cross distribution session on Guix things, issues with upstreams and various other topics.

I was already thinking about a patch I made to Ruby, and used in govuk-guix to make downloading Rubygems more reproducible, however I was hesitant to push it upstream as I wasn't sure it was more generally useful. I ended up talking about this in the skill share session, and found someone else who was interested in Ruby reproducible builds. I've now pushed that patch up for review.

Thursday

I went along to a session on rebuilders, mostly to try and figure out the relevance to Guix. I have a better understanding of this now. Guix, and some other projects (Nix, maybe F-Droid, ...) already have some of the pieces of this just due to how they normally work. For Guix, the technical side of a "rebuilder" is just a standard "build farm", ci.guix.info, or hydra.gnu.org for example.

The client verification with rebuilders is also mostly in place already for Guix. Whereas in Debian, you need to use the buildinfo files to check with rebuilders about the results they got, the narinfo files Guix uses when trying to find substitutes already fulfil this purpose, just because of how Guix works.

I'm looking forward to all of the things that these events have boosted. The next month or two is going to be very interesting, with things like FOSDEM coming up at the start of February, and Guix maybe releasing a 1.0 around then.