Last week I attended the reproducible builds world summit in Paris.
It was very well organized by Holger, Gunner and their hidden helpers in the background. Very similar to the last 2 summits I attended in Berlin.

Because we were around 50 participants, introductions and announcements were the only things done in the big group. All actual work happened in 5-10 smaller circles.

We had participants from large companies like Google (with bazel), MicroSoft and Huawei, but also from many distributions and open source projects. Even MirageOS as non-Linux OS.

We did knowledge-sharing, refine definitions of terms, evolve concepts like “rebuilders” for verifying builds and allow users to better trust software they install, and such.

I learned about the undocumented DB dump (153 MB) and DB schema

And we had some hacking time, too, so there is now
a jenkins job that renders the list of unreproducible openSUSE Factory packages.

Also, my maintainer tool now has added support for the Alpine Linux distribution, thanks to help by one of its maintainers: Natanael Copa.
This is meant to help all cross-distro collaboration, not just for reproducible builds.

There is still work to be done to make better use of Mitre CPE to map package names across distributions.

I think, one major benefit of the summit was all the networking and talking going on, so that we have an easier time working with each other over the internet in the future.