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That's such a weird characterization of this article, which (in contrast to other writing on this subject) clearly concludes (a) that Nix achieves a very high d
by pxc 2y ago
That's such a weird characterization of this article, which (in contrast to other writing on this subject) clearly concludes (a) that Nix achieves a very high degree of reproducibility and is continuously improving in this respect, and (b) Nix is moreover reproducible in a way that most other distros (even distros that do well in some measures of bitwise reproducibility) are not (namely, time traveling— being able to reproduce builds in different environments, even months or years later, because the build environment itself is more reproducible).
The article you linked is very clear that both qualitatively and quantitatively, NixOS has made achieved high degrees of reproducibility, and even explicitly rejects the possibility of assessing absolute reproducibility.
NixOS may not be the absolute leader here (that's probably stagex, or GuixSD if you limit yourself to more practical distros with large package collections), but it is indeed very good.
Did you mean to link to a different article?
- looofooo0 2y agoWhat does high degree mean? Either you achieve bit for bit reproducibility of your builds or not.
- kfajdsl 2y agoIf 99% of the packages in your repos are bit-for-bit reproducible, you can consider your distro to have a high degree of reproducibility.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pxc 2y agoAnd with even a little bit of imagination, it's easy to think of other possible measures of degrees of reproducibility, e.g.: • % of deployed systems which consist only of reproducibly built packages • % of commonly downloaded disk images (install media, live media, VM images, etc.) consist only of reproducibly built packages • total # of reproducibly built packages available • comparative measures of what NixOS is doing right like: of packages that are reproducibly built in some distros but not others, how many are built reproducibly in NixOS • binary bootstrap size (smaller is better, obviously) It's really not difficult to think of meaningful ways that reproducibility of different distros might be compared, even quantitatively.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago> NixOS may not be the absolute leader here (that's probably stagex, or GuixSD if you limit yourself to more practical distros with large package collections), but it is indeed very good. Could you comment on how stagex is? It looks like it might indeed be best in class, but I've hardly heard it mentioned.
- pabs3 2y agoThe Bootstrappable Builds folks created a way to go from only an MBR of (commented) machine code (plus a ton of source) all the way up to a Linux distro. The stagex folks built on top of that towards OCI containers. https://stagex.tools/ https://stagex.tools/ https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/ https://lwn.net/Articles/983340/ https://lwn.net/Articles/983340/