Tails

#10 Updated by lamby 2017-08-17 14:44:35

anonym wrote:
> Any way, I see no progress on these four child tickets since their creation a month ago, and I’m wondering if there is some way I can help to get things rolling, or are you just busy on other fronts?

Oh, what a shame. I was not aware I should (and/or was “authed”) to work on it. Indeed, you were quite careful recently to check admin blah with intri beforehand, and I saw no reason why that wouldn’t remain. In other words, would love to get onto this, just waiting for the nod.

#12 Updated by lamby 2017-08-18 17:10:15

anonym wrote:
> Ok, this is definitely my fault. I have no definite memory, but it feels like a comment on this ticket was lost (I do have a tendency to update tickets and forget to press “Submit” which could explain it…).

Seriously, no worries. The only reason I wrote so much was so that we can all improve our processes! And I’ve also done the whole “forgetting to press ‘Send’” many times too :)

> spend a day on investigating whether these .cache files have something in common that could give a single explanation for all of them.

Sounds good; am on it :)

#15 Updated by anonym 2017-09-15 17:41:47

intrigeri wrote:
> (Two of the subtasks are apparently not fully fixed yet.)

Now they are most likely fixed, thanks to lamby’s new patches. Let’s see! I’ll keep this ticket open until 3.2 final, when we hopefully know whether they are enough.

#16 Updated by lamby 2017-09-15 18:07:38

anonym wrote:
> intrigeri wrote:
> > (Two of the subtasks are apparently not fully fixed yet.)
>
> Now they are most likely fixed, thanks to lamby’s new patches. Let’s see! I’ll keep this ticket open until 3.2 final, when we hopefully know whether they are enough.

\o/ \o/ \o/

So glad to help out :)

#17 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-21 10:18:31

Every subtask is either “resolved” or “fix committed”. Anything else to do here?

#20 Updated by anonym 2017-09-21 14:28:48

kurono was affected by Bug #13440 and Bug #13442 when he tried to reproduce 3.2~alpha2, but is not any more with 3.2~rc1 which was reproduced successfully! This looks promising as it is a data point supporting the hypothesis that lamby’s patches now are complete!

Woo! You rock, lamby!

#21 Updated by lamby 2017-09-21 14:35:39

anonym wrote:
> kurono was affected by Bug #13440 and Bug #13442 when he tried to reproduce 3.2~alpha2, but is not any more with 3.2~rc1 which was reproduced successfully! This looks promising as it is a data point supporting the hypothesis that lamby’s patches now are complete!
>
> Woo! You rock, lamby!

\o\ /o/

So, now, is that the official position of the Tails Project…? Can we get the press team onto publicising that? ;)

#23 Updated by anonym 2017-09-21 14:49:46

lamby wrote:
> So, now, is that the official position of the Tails Project…? Can we get the press team onto publicising that? ;)

Good point! I think so! :) There was some internal controversy about what the requirements for calling Tails reprodicible should be, but I hope we can agree that it’s achieved once all known issues are fixed. So unless some of the others that were affected by this ticket’s children report failures, I guess we are there, i.e. “Tails is reproducible” (!). :)

#24 Updated by Anonymous 2017-09-21 15:04:48

anonym wrote:
> lamby wrote:
> > So, now, is that the official position of the Tails Project…? Can we get the press team onto publicising that? ;)
>
> Good point! I think so! :) There was some internal controversy about what the requirements for calling Tails reprodicible should be, but I hope we can agree that it’s achieved once all known issues are fixed. So unless some of the others that were affected by this ticket’s children report failures, I guess we are there, i.e. “Tails is reproducible” (!). :)

Awesome!!!

I think we should not prepare such communication right now. But there are two tickets to communicate about this to the tech community and to our users (could be done in a monthly report for example).

#25 Updated by anonym 2017-09-21 15:10:11

u wrote:
> I think we should not prepare such communication right now. But there are two tickets to communicate about this to the tech community and to our users (could be done in a monthly report for example).

I know about Feature #12626, but not of any ticket about communicating this to our users.

#26 Updated by lamby 2017-09-21 15:57:05

> ideas about what environmental discrepancies could have been the trigger for these sources of non-determinism?

My immediate gut guess is that different filesytem. eg. ext-family vs. btfs vs. xfs.

> internal controversy about what the requirements for calling Tails reprodicible should be

Ah, sorry, you misunderstand; I was talking about it being the official Policy of the Tails Project that “lamby rocks”… g

#27 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-21 16:28:52

> Ah, sorry, you misunderstand; I was talking about it being the official Policy of the Tails Project that “lamby rocks”… g

As per our non-existing Democratic Constitution that I embody (that much is pretty obvious), this ought to be discussed on the tails-project@boum.org mailing list instead of behind closed curtains within the (sadly limited) ranks of our Great Redmine Cabal.

Needless to say, I’ll wholeheartedly second this proposal. Now, here’s the politician in me speaking: I think this proposal will get more traction if it comes with at least a rough design wrt. how it will be implemented. I doubt integrating this into our Social Contract will work well. Perhaps a banner on our website? Or a simple, catchy statement on the desktop wallpaper in Tails itself? Of course, we shall take into account how it’ll work on the long term, striving towards minimization of maintenance costs: what’s the process to update this official policy? I suggest it should automatically expire after N years; and the closest we have to a GR (i.e. myself and/or sajolida convincing everyone that we’re right) can revoke it at any time earlier. What do you think?

[To all innocent bystanders: yes, I’m somewhat joking.]

#28 Updated by anonym 2017-09-22 00:01:10

lamby wrote:
> > ideas about what environmental discrepancies could have been the trigger for these sources of non-determinism?
>
> My immediate gut guess is that different filesytem. eg. ext-family vs. btfs vs. xfs.

Note that the same filesystems (ext4, tmpfs) are always used in the guest VM that actually builds Tails. Did you overlook this, or does the host OS’ filesystems in fact really matter?

> > internal controversy about what the requirements for calling Tails reprodicible should be
>
> Ah, sorry, you misunderstand; I was talking about it being the official Policy of the Tails Project that “lamby rocks”… g

Aaah! Indeed! Let’s continue this discussion on tails-project@. I anticipate zero resistance. :)

#29 Updated by lamby 2017-09-22 08:15:32

anonym wrote:

> Note that the same filesystems (ext4, tmpfs) are always used in the guest VM that actually builds Tails. Did you overlook this, or does the host OS’ filesystems in fact really matter?

Ah, interesting. Does the git checkout happen inside there or outsie? I’m just trying to think why, for example, files might be checked out in a different order… :)

#30 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-22 08:40:01

My theory is still that depending on the initial state of the apt-cacher-ng cache, packages that trigger cache refreshes might be installed in a different order.

#31 Updated by lamby 2017-09-22 08:45:14

intrigeri wrote:
> My theory is still that depending on the initial state of the apt-cacher-ng cache, packages that trigger cache refreshes might be installed in a different order.

Hm, or something about the parallel APT HTTP downloads? Acquire::Queue-Mode “access”; etc. :)

#32 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-22 09:34:14

> Hm, or something about the parallel APT HTTP downloads? Acquire::Queue-Mode “access”; etc. :)

Yep.

#34 Updated by lamby 2017-09-26 13:35:09

anonym wrote:
> intrigeri’s theory sounds reasonable, and easy to figure out in the future, should we need it. I think we can just ignore it for now.

Agreed, although I would just add that even if we could prove it now it might still mean we fix the underlying problems in the fture instead of setting various (rare) APT settings or defining “one must use ext4” or whatever the issue or issues are. :)

Anyway, yay. :)