Great achievement by the NixOS Developers. Congratulations!
Very cool, reproducible builds are a massive amount of work. Good to see Nixos succeeding in this regard.
I thought NixOS was already reproducible, like, isn’t that the whole point? What’s the big deal here, and why is it a “great achievement” - does the Linux world now completely change? Does this revolutionize how Linux ISOs are built?
From my understanding, Nix is currently reproducible in that you can easily run an install with a script that gets you set up with the packages and configuration that you want, but the announcement is that they can verify the binaries that they ship are faithful to their source, and haven’t been tampered with anywhere in the build pipeline
That is almost word for word would the body of the post says
I think the ISO specifically wasn’t reproducible but now it is.
Nix packages are probably what you’re thinking of. They are reproducible
In general nix packages are not reproducible in the sense that the output will be bit-for-bit identical. When a package is built on two different machines, nix will run the same commands, with the same environment variables, using identical inputs (e.g. source tarballs). However there are various ways build systems, compilers etc can still be non-deterministic, and this effort is about fixing that.
If I remember correctly the F-Droid team on Android had a lot of trouble getting reproductible builds. I can’t imagine how difficult this would be for a whole system.
