where are .buildinfo files kept in debian source package?

Question

I have been following the reproducible-builds projects for sometime now and did read/hear somewhere that Debian will start shipping .buildinfo files in Debian source files for quite sometime.

I downloaded few source files for some different things few days back, I looked through and wasn't able to find the .buildinfo files. Does anybody if Debian has started .buildinfo files or not. If not, why ? If they have started to ship .buildinfo what is the path where they have put it (a consistent path) and any idea when they will be available archive-wide ?

Answer 1

The buildinfo files aren’t kept as part of Debian source packages, and they can’t be — they’re not part of the source, they’re a reflection of the build environment used when building a binary package. They are now produced with all package builds, and are uploaded alongside the binary packages. If you have access to ftp-master.debian.org you can see them in /srv/ftp-master.debian.org/buildinfo (one subdirectory per day, e.g. 2017/02/07); they are also made available unofficially on this buildinfo mirror. They are supposed to be made available officially at some point, but I don’t know when that will happen.

You might find Holger Levsen’s recent talk with Dennis Gilmore at DevConf.cz on the topic quite interesting; Holger talks about buildinfo files early on in the talk.