Morten Linderud

Just writing to agree, since you are getting pushback.

@Foxboron wrote a compelling if clickbaity post a few months back to poke at the bit-for-bit interpretation of what reproducibility means in nixland: https://linderud.dev/blog/nixos-is-not-reproducible/

It didn't get much traction here (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=linderud.dev) but there was more lively discussion on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/jpoy4q/nixos_is_not_reproducible

(That said, the nix ecosystem does have levers and practices for working to weed out common sources of build reproducibility problems and the community is reasonably interested/active here. But there isn't any magic in it that fixes all bit-for-bit issues. People still have to catch, tag, and fix them.)

I’m picking this nit:

> When is a build reproducible?

> “A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts.”

> Neither Nix or NixOS gives you these guarantees.

This really makes me question whether all of the quirkiness of Nix is worth it if it can’t actually “pay off” with true reproducibility.

[1] “NixOS is not reproducible (2022) https://linderud.dev/blog/nixos-is-not-reproducible/

[2] “non reproducible issues in NixOS” https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/projects/30

I'm currently involved in an effort to rip out docker swarm at work because its overlay networks are shockingly unreliable. LXD looks interesting but https://linderud.dev/blog/packaging-lxd-for-arch-linux/ convinced me that it's another Canonical NIH special and probably best avoided (in particular, "only distributed for Ubuntu via snaps" means "forces auto-updates" which means "not going in my environment"). Need to try Nomad; I'm cautiously optimistic since the rest of HashiCorp's stuff is good.