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So one of the pillars of the article is that docker builds aren't reproducible, but Nix is. But... is a lot of that irreproducibiity (apologies for that word)

So one of the pillars of the article is that docker builds aren't reproducible, but Nix is. But... is a lot of that irreproducibiity (apologies for that word) because there's no guarantee one of the docker layers will be available? And... does Nix have some guarantee to the end of the universe that package versions will stay in the repository?

operator-name 3y ago
I'd give this article a read, as it can explain it more clearly than I can: https://serokell.io/blog/what-is-nix https://serokell.io/blog/what-is-nix But to briefly answer your specific questions: Docker files are commonly not reproducible because they contain arbitary stateful commands like `apt-get update`, `curl`, etc. For a layer with these kinds of commands to be reproducible you would need a mechanism to version and verify the result. Nix provides such a mechanism, and a community package repository with versioned dependancies between packages. These are defined in a domain specific language called Nix (text files) and kept into a git repository. This should be familiar if you've used a package manager with lock files before. You can guarentee the package version will stay in the repository by pinning your build to an exact commit hash in the repository.