alt Hacker NewsThis is a huge achievement for Debian and the free software world.
It took a while though until this was understood. In 2007 when pointing out on debian-devel that this is needed, I was still told what huge waste of time this would be. And indeed it took a huge amount of work by many people to get there, but it is well worth it.
There was no bug or attack on Debian since 2007 that reproducible packages would prevent.
"Well worth it" is not correct. And it just ups the the contribution barrier to Debian higher, I already heard a lot of people complaining that contributing to Debian is hard and while in past I defended it by "they need all the checks and bounds to make sure packages play with eachother nicely", this is just step that makes it hard for no reason and little benefit.