The Nix approach is any package-specific tricks are left to the plan writer, and Nix's job is to sandbox things. We ought to look things down further and furthe

The Nix approach is any package-specific tricks are left to the plan writer, and Nix's job is to sandbox things. We ought to look things down further and further until build jobs can be deterministic by construction. Until that ideal is reached, you could call "leaving it to the plan writer" a cop-out, but what else is there to do? It's the stop-gap. The benefit of the new system is that all store paths can be content-addressed. That means the inputs of all build stems can be content-addressed, whereas before they might also be "input-addressed" paths whose contents are also a matter of trust. This means one takes "small step" rather than "big step" trust steps, and also that upstream non-determinism won't "pollute" downstream builds.