NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
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NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
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Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#2[deleted]
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#3Sorry for being dense, but I thought one of the main reason for nixos's existence is reproducibilty. I thought they have these kinds of things solved already.
I have only ~2 hours experience with Nixos, wanted to try hyprland, I thought it would be easier on Nixos since hyprland needs a bit of setup and maybe it's easier to use someone else's config on nixos, than on some other distro. Finding a config was hard too, found like 3 on some random github gists, thought there would be more... and none of them worked, at that point I gave up.
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#4For those wondering : it should be remembered that the reproducibility of Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs is only a reproducibility of the sources: if the sources change, one is warned, but it is not a question of the reproducibility of the binaries (which can change at each build). This binary reproducibility of Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs is indeed not really tested, at least not systematically.
Guix, Archlinux, Debian do the binary reproducibility better than Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs.
Sources :
- https://r13y.com/ ( Nix* )
- https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.ht... ( Debian )
- https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/archlinux/archlinux.ht... ( Archlinux )
- https://data.guix.gnu.org/repository/1/branch/master/latest-... (Guix, might be a bit slow to load, here is some cached copy https://archive.is/lTuPk )
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#5Sorry for being dense, but I thought one of the main reason for nixos's existence is reproducibilty. I thought they have these kinds of things solved already. I have only ~2 hours experience with Nixos, wanted to try hyprland, I thought it would be easier on Nixos since hyprland needs a bit of setup and maybe it's easier to use someone else's config on nixos, than on some other distro. Finding a config was hard too,…
Yeah, Nix is a tough tool to learn. It's probably never the right tool to pick for "I just want something that works right now" if you're unfamiliar with it.
> I thought one of the main reason for nixos's existence is reproducibilty
NixOS uses "reproducible" to mean "with the same Nix code, you get the same program behaviour". This is more/less what people hope Dockerfiles provide.
This is the level of reproducibility you want when you say "it works on my machine" or "it worked last time I tried it".
Whereas "reproducible build" aims for bit-for-bit equality for artifacts build on different machines. -- With this, there's a layer of security in that you can verify that code has been built from a particular set of sources.
> Finding a config was hard too
What search query were you using? Searching "nixos configuration" on https://github.com/search?q=nixos%20configuration&type=repos...
Or searching for hyprland specifically, there seem to be many using that https://github.com/search?q=wayland.windowManager.hyprland&t...
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#6Sorry for being dense, but I thought one of the main reason for nixos's existence is reproducibilty. I thought they have these kinds of things solved already. I have only ~2 hours experience with Nixos, wanted to try hyprland, I thought it would be easier on Nixos since hyprland needs a bit of setup and maybe it's easier to use someone else's config on nixos, than on some other distro. Finding a config was hard too,…
There are two senses of reproducible.
The sense you're thinking of is that you can easily rebuild a binary package and it will use the same dependency versions, build options, etc. There should be no chance of a compiler error that didn't happen the first time (the old "but it worked on my laptop" syndrome).
The sense used here is that every build output is byte-for-byte binary identical. It doesn't depend on the machine name, the time it was compiled or anything like that (or, in a parallel build, the order in which files finish compiling). That is much harder.
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#7Rebuilding the minimal ISO from source is an impressive milestone on the journey to a system that builds from source reproducibly. Guix had an orthogonal but equally impressive milestone on the same journey recently[0], bootstrapping a full compiler toolchain from a single reproducible 357 byte binary without any other binary compiler blobs. These two features may one day soon be combined to reproducibly build a full distribution from source.
[0] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#8For those wondering : it should be remembered that the reproducibility of Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs is only a reproducibility of the sources: if the sources change, one is warned, but it is not a question of the reproducibility of the binaries (which can change at each build). This binary reproducibility of Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs is indeed not really tested, at least not systematically. Guix, Archlinux, Debian do the bina…
r13y.com is outdated vs. https://reproducible.nixos.org/
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#9For those wondering : it should be remembered that the reproducibility of Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs is only a reproducibility of the sources: if the sources change, one is warned, but it is not a question of the reproducibility of the binaries (which can change at each build). This binary reproducibility of Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs is indeed not really tested, at least not systematically. Guix, Archlinux, Debian do the bina…
> Guix, Archlinux, Debian do the binary reproducibility better than Nix / NixOS / Nixpkgs.
Huh, didn't know that Arch Linux tests reproducibility. It's apparently 85.6% reproducible: https://reproducible.archlinux.org
I wonder how much work would be needed for NixOS, considering it has more than 80k packages in the official repository.
Re: NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
#10Sorry for being dense, but I thought one of the main reason for nixos's existence is reproducibilty. I thought they have these kinds of things solved already. I have only ~2 hours experience with Nixos, wanted to try hyprland, I thought it would be easier on Nixos since hyprland needs a bit of setup and maybe it's easier to use someone else's config on nixos, than on some other distro. Finding a config was hard too,…
Yeah, Nix is a tough tool to learn. It's probably never the right tool to pick for "I just want something that works right now" if you're unfamiliar with it. > I thought one of the main reason for nixos's existence is reproducibilty NixOS uses "reproducible" to mean "with the same Nix code, you get the same program behaviour". This is more/less what people hope Dockerfiles provide. This is the level of reproducibilit…
> NixOS uses "reproducible" to mean "with the same Nix code, you get the same program behaviour".
Note that ”Nix code” also includes the hashes of all non-Nix sources. One way to think of it is that Nix has reliable build cache invalidation.
> This is more/less what people hope Dockerfiles provide.
Indeed, but importantly they do not provide input-reproducibility (while Nix does) because, at least, there are no hashes for remote data.