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Be sure to archive your development tools as well, just in case that rug gets pulled. You don't want to be in the position that you need v3.1415927 of FooWare X

• fbdab103 4y ago
  I do not know if Nix will be the answer, but I really hope it or a successor drags us to fully explicit and reproducible builds.
  • maxyurk 4y ago
    for reproducing a build you need at the least the source and the tools to build it which might not be available as well
    • tlavoie 4y ago
      Yes, but Nix is essentially about getting things built, so those build tools are part of the recipe to make something happen. I'm still learning Nix myself, but one small example: a small, Haskell-based utility I've written depends on specific versions of one library, due to API changes. That version gets lumped in according to some GHC versions. The whole situation was uncomfortable, in that code I had left working, stopped building some time later when I came back to run with whatever was seeming more current. Defining a short nix flake solved all of that. That first compile was a slog, since it fetched and built the appropriate GHC and libraries, including whatever transitive dependencies those needed. Once done though, those are cached, and "nix build" just works.